Expectations of Modernity: Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt 9780520922280

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Expectations of Modernity

Expectations Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the Zambian Copperbelt

James Ferguson

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS Berkeley . Los Angeles . London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

0 1999 by the Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ferguson, James, 19 59-. Expectations of modernity : myths and meanings of urban life on the Zambian Copperbelt 1 James Ferguson. p. cm.-Perspectives on Southern Africa : 57) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN g78-0-5zo-z170~-7(pbk. : alk. paper) I. Urban anthropology-Zambia-Copperbelt Province. 2. Urbanization-Zambia-Copperbelt Province. 3. Industrialization-ZambiaCopperbelt Province. 4. Copper industry and tradeZambia-Copperbelt Province. 5. Copper mines and mining-Zambia-Copperbelt Province. 6. Zambia-Social conditions-1964. 7. ZambiaEconomic conditions-1964. 8. Zambia-Politics and government. I. Title. 11. Series. GN657.R4F47 1999 306'.0g68g4--dcz1 98-473 5 5 CIP

Manufactured in the United States of America 15 14 13 I Z 11 10 09 08 07 14 13 1 2 11 10 9 8 7 6 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-199% (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

For Liisa

List of Illustrations List of Tables List of Cases Acknowledgments

xiii xv

I. The Copperbelt in Theory

From "Emerging Africa" to the Ethnography of Decline 2.

Expectations of Permanence Mobile Workers, Modernist Narratives, and the "Full House" of Urban-Rural Residential Strategies

3. Rural Connections, Urban Styles Theorizing Cultural Dualism

4. "Back to the Land"? The Micropolitical Economy of "Return" Migration

5. Expectations of Domesticity Men, Women, and "the Modern Family"

I 66

vii

Contents

viii

6. Asia in Miniature Signification, Noise, and Cosmopolitan Style

7. Global Disconnect Abjection and the Aftermath of Modernism

Postscript: December 1998 Appendix: Mineworkers' Letters Notes References Index

Illustrations

PLATES A view of the concentrator at Luanshya A fieldwork snapshot 3. "Attractive hostesses have become a feature of air travel the world over-and Zambia is no exception" I.

2.

FIGURES The buying power The RLI model of culture 3 . The stylistic space 4. The Musonda kin I.

2.

of Zambian exports, 1970-1986 social stratification and urban of cosmopolitanism and localism network

MAPS I. 2.

3.

Map of Zambia Map of Zambian Copperbelt Ex-mineworkers' resettlement locations: ten cases

Tables

I. 2.

3. 4. 5. 6.

7.

Unit value of exports and imports, terms of trade, and buying power of export;, 1970-1986 Life expectancy and child mortality of urban Copperbelt residents, 1980-1990 Average length of service at Roan Antelope, 1930-1960 Labor turnover at Roan Antelope, 1930-1960 Married employees in the mines, 1929-1962 Proportion of large households, urban Copperbelt versus rural Luapula and Northern Provinces, 1980 Women (ages 12 and over) employed in Copperbelt Province: Mining, trade, and total, 1990

8 12

56 56 59 183 I94

Cases

I. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

Jonah Mulele: "This is how it is supposed to be!" George Kabamba: "We are starving a lot" Edwin Chinunda: "One could think I had not worked for the mines for twenty-one years" Joseni Mulenga: "All these clothes are nothingwhat we want is your soul!" Peter Chipumbu: "The place was not suitable for me" James Mpundu: "What I have is very sweet, but what you have isn't" M. M. Chanda: "No relatives: That can be a problem!" Paul Mukande: "They will see that I am different!" Luke Musonda: "One finger cannot catch lice" Gideon Kalumba: "Being a Christian, I decided to live alone" The divorce of the Mpundus: "She is completely imagining it!" The ordeal of Mrs. Mwaba: "Almost like a slave!" The Chipumbus' search for home: Between a rock and a hard place

xiii

Acknowledgments

In the course of this project, I have accumulated a great many debts of gratitude, only a few of which I am able to acknowledge here. Two periods of field research in Zambia (October 1985-September 1986 and July 1989-August 1989) were funded by fellowships from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. Visits to libraries and archives in London and Belgium in subsequent years were funded by the School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine. The conclusions, opinions, and other statements in this book, however, are those of the author and not necessarily those of the above organizations. The research was done in affiliation with the Institute of African Studies (today, the Institute of Economic and Social Research) at the University of Zambia. I am deeply grateful to the Institute's Director, Mr. Oliver Saasa, and the Research Affiliation Officer, Mrs. Ilse Mwanza, for their unflagging support of my project. Without their help, this book would not have been possible. The research was also made possible through the kind cooperation of the officers of Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines (ZCCM), who have maintained over the years a commendable policy of not only permitting but facilitating social research. I am especially grateful to the then Acting Deputy Director of Personnel at ZCCM, Mr. B. C. YambaYamba, for approving my research project, and to Mr. Khanja Mohango, then Personnel Manager at the Nkana Division of ZCCM, for

xvi

Acknowledgments

helping me to arrange rental housing in the Nkana West section of Kitwe in 1985-86, and for providing me office space in the Community Services Department. Among the officers in Community Services who assisted me, I owe a special debt to the director of the time, Mr. Benson Lombe, and to Mr. Gerald Kenani. I am also grateful to the many officers of the Copper Industry Service Bureau who helped me to obtain a great deal of useful information. Mr. Joe Hassan and Mr. Peter Chanda were especially helpful and generous with their time. Many officials of the Mineworkers' Union of Zambia were also extremely helpful to me in pursuing my research. Chief among these was Mr. Koshita Sheng'amo (then Research Officer, later rising to the rank of Deputy Secretary General and then Secretary General), who not only granted me practical assistance in many ways but served as a valued intellectual colleague during my time in the field, sharing with me his insightful views on a wide range of social and political matters. I owe a great personal debt of thanks to Mr. Passmore Hamukoma and Mrs. Chilufya Nchito-Hamukoma, who showed me great warmth and friendship during my time in Zambia and helped me in ways too numerous to mention. John and Margaret Shenton, too, were good friends, whose engaging company meant more to me than they probably realized. My principal research assistant for this project, Mr. Moses Mutondo, aided me throughout. He has my profound gratitude. His keen observations and astute analysis of the Copperbelt scene marked him as a natural ethnographer, a fact that I have tried to acknowledge by scattering "people-watching" vignettes throughout the book to reflect my own experience of excitement and illumination in listening to his closely observed commentaries on the social world around him. Among all the Zambians who helped me with this project, I am most indebted to the mineworkers who became my informants, and especially to those who agreed to keep in touch with me over a period of years, so that I might get a sense of the longer-term trajectory of workers who left the world of urban wage work. They overwhelmed me with their willingness to help with my project. I only hope that I have begun to keep my promise to them that I would seek to use their cooperation to build a better understanding of their problems, so that workers' lives might be better in the future. In addition to all the people who have helped me in Zambia, I am also indebted to a great many people in the academic world in the United States and elsewhere. My original conception for this project was in-

Acknowledgments

xvii

formed and inspired by my teachers, Sally Falk Moore and Jane Guyer. In the years since then, I have presented sections of the book to dozens of audiences and received suggestions and constructive criticism from scholars too numerous to list. Among the most important commentators for me have been Liisa Malkki, Fred Cooper, John Comaroff, Akhil Gupta, Bill Maurer, and Debra Spitulnik. One of my graduate students, Ricardo Ovalle-Bahamon, played an especially valuable role, serving as a research assistant during two months of fieldwork in Zambia in the summer of 1989, and helping me to sharpen my ideas through many stimulating discussions. Another, Eric Kaldor, provided an extremely helpful critical reading, as well as doing the index for the book. Library work for the project was done at the University of California, Irvine, the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of Helsinki. Valuable documentation was also obtained through the Publications Office at the University of Zambia. Finally, I would like to give a special thanks to Henrietta Moore and Megan Vaughan for their remarkable book, Cutting Down Trees: Gender, Nutrition, and Agricultural Change in the Northern Province of Zambia, 1890-1990. By providing an empirically rigorous and theoretically sophisticated example of how one could write a book that would be simultaneously about social change (changing empirical patterns in social arrangements) and "social change" (the historically constituted way of seeing that formed an "ethnographic record" that can never be taken simply as a "baseline"), they gave me inspiration for the final round of work on this book, which I would like to think is in at least some ways a kindred project.

CHAPTER ONE

The Copperbelt in Theory From "Emerging AfricaJyt o the Ethnography of Decline Calo cesu cileya pantanshi Na 'fwe bantu tuleya pantanshi.

Our country is going forward, And we the people, too.' Copperbelt popular song (and opening quotation to A. L. Epstein's Politics in an African Community, 1958)

Car owning remains a dream. A decade ago, young men in gainful employment were able to buy cars of all models. That era is gone, gone never to return again. Terence Mztsuku, "Dreams Are Made o f This," Times o f Zambia, ]uly 2 1 , 1989

DREAMS ARE MADE O F THIS: " M O D E R N AFRICA" TODAY In the mid-1960s, everyone knew, Africa was "emerging." And no place was emerging faster or more hopefully than Zambia, the newly independent nation that had previously been known as Northern Rhodesia. The initiation of large-scale copper mining in the late 1920s had set off a burst of industrial development that had utterly transformed the country; by the time of Independence in 1964, that industrial growth seemed sure to propel the new nation rapidly along the path of what was called "modernization." From being a purely rural agricultural territory at the time of its takeover by Cecil Rhodes's British South Africa Company in the r89os, the modern nation-state of Zambia had by 1969 arrived at an urban population of over I million (nearly 30 percent of the pop-

2

Expectations of Modernity

ulation), with total waged employment of over 750,000 (of a total population of just over 4 million) (Zambia 1973, I:I), and a vibrant industrial economy that made it one of the richest and most promising of the new African states. Observers from early on were stunned by the rapidity and scale of the social transformation that had taken place along the urban, industrial "line of rail" that ran from Livingstone in the south all the way to the Copperbelt in the north (see Map I ) . Within a few short years following the development of commercial copper mining, mining towns sprang up all along the Copperbelt (Map 2 ) . European colonists settled the new towns in numbers, while "natives" came by the thousands to seek work in the mines and other new industries. Africa was having its "Industrial Revolution," thought the missionary Sandilands, at a brutal and blinding speed; the process had "something of the suddenness and ruthlessness and irresistibility, on the social plane, of what, on the military plane, we have become familiar with as the German 'blitzkrieg' " (Sandilands 1948, ixj. The social anthropologist J. C. Mitchell concurred: "We in Northern Rhodesia to-day are living in a revolution, the intensity of which, as far as we can judge, has not been equalled in thousands of years" (195 I , 20). Already in 1941 Godfrey Wilson had sensed an epochal transformation: Over the heart of a poor and primitive continent civilization has laid a finger of steel; it has stirred a hundred tribes together; it has brought them new wealth, new ambitions, new knowledge, new interests, new faiths and new problems. (Wilson 1941, 9 )

Thirty-five years later, Robert Bates remained equally impressed: Less than a century ago, Zambia was exclusively agrarian; in the present era, it is a society dependent upon large-scale industry. Once characterized by village society, the territory that is now Zambia contains a score of cities of IOO,OOOor more persons, and these cities contain over 40 percent of its population. Where but a little over fifty years ago forests once stood, there now stand copper mines; and the marketed produce from these mines makes Zambia one of the world's leading exporters of this mineral. (Bates 1976, I )

There was already something a little off here. Wilson's dramatic vision of "small-scale society" being suddenly replaced by "large-scale" industrialism ignored both the shallowness of "the industrial revolution" (which was largely confined to mining) as well as the way that Africans in the region had been bound up in large-scale political struc-

The Copperbelt in Theory

3

Plate I. A view of the concentrator at Luanshya. (Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines Limited, 1984 annual report)

tures and long-distance trade for centuries before. Nor was wage labor so new in the 1920s and 1930s as it appeared-Africans from Northern Rhodesia had already been migrating in numbers to work in the mines in Katanga across the border with the Belgian Congo for at least twenty years, and some had gone as far as Rhodesia and South Africa even earlier (Perrings 1979,14-23; Parpart 198 3,3 1-3 z; Meebelo 1986,19).

Expectations of Modernity

.......

Provincial boundary

Copperbelt urban area

Map

I.

Map of Zambia (Source:Daniel 1979:s)

Bates's "score of cities of ~ o o , o o oor more persons," meanwhile, turned out on inspection to be only five.2 The overdramatic and exaggerated narration of the rise of industrialism and urbanism here reflected the extent to which the Zambian experience captured something in the modernist imagination and came not only to exemplify but to epitomize the revolution that was understood to be taking place in Africa. It was neither rapid change nor the existence of mineral wealth alone that made Zambia and its industrial core, the Copperbelt, such a good symbol of "emerging Africa." Africa, after all, had seen plenty of both in the past. Instead, it was the particular character of the social and economic transformation that captured the imagination. Zambia at its 1964 Independence was a highly urbanized nation, and newly so. The mining towns that had sprung up on the Copperbelt symbolized newness in a way that older cities could not. Here, unlike many other parts of Africa, the very idea of cities was a "modern" And "urbanization" was understood to involve not simply a movement in space but an epochal leap in evolutionary time. Cooper has explained:

The Copperbelt in Theory

0 0

5

5

10Miles

10 15 Kilometers

Map 2. Map of Zambian Copperbelt (Adapted from Zambia Secondary School Atlas, Office of the Surveyor General, Ministry of Lands and Natural Resources [Zambia, 19831) As Africans flocked into cities in ever greater numbers in the 195os, the dualist approach to urbanization suggested that they were entering the mainstream of history. The key word in the urban anthropology of those years was "adaptation," and studies stressed how organizations from ethnic associations to trade unions eased the-inevitablemovement into an urban way of life. The liberal affirmation that the African was becoming an urbanite was an affirmation of modernity. (Cooper 1983a, 12)

Urbanization, then, seemed to be a teleological process, a movement toward a known end point that would be nothing less than a Westernstyle industrial modernity. An urbanizing Africa was a modernizing one, and there was no place urbanizing faster than Zambia. What is more, the expanding mining economy that was driving the urbanization process was a stereotypically industrial one, whose noisy smelting plants and sooty miners seemed to reiterate a well-known chapter in the usual narratives of the West's own rise to modernity, evoking particularly the

6

Expectations of Modernity

iconic images of the early period of British industrialization. And everyone knew where that had led. A certain convergence with a familiar Western model thus seemed to be no speculation; it was directly observable in the smokestacks that dramatically appeared on the horizon as a traveler approached the Copperbelt from the south. What was happening along the line of rail, as Max Gluckman and others insisted, was nothing less than "the African Industrial Revolution" (Gluckman 1961; Moore and Sandilands 1948). Until recently, this vision seemed to many a convincing and straightforwardly descriptive account of what was happening in Zambia. Throughout the 1960s and most of the 197os, we must remember, Zambia was not reckoned an African "basket case," but a "middle-income country," with excellent prospects for "full" industrialization and even ultimate admission to the ranks of the "developed" world. In 1969 its per capita gross domestic product (GDP)was not only one of the highest in Africa (more than three times that of Kenya, and twice that of Egypt, for instance), it was also significantly higher than that of such "up-andcoming" middle-income nations as Brazil, Malaysia, South Korea, and Turkey. Indeed, with what appeared to be a rapidly rising per capita GDP of $431, it did not seem unreasonable to suppose that Zambia might soon reach the ranks of at least the poorer European nations such as Portugal, with a 1969 per capita GDP of just $568, or Spain, with $867 (United Nations 1973, 627-629). Even as late as 1979, Zambia was still being reckoned a "middle-income country," whose GNP justified a ranking above such countries as the Philippines, Thailand, or Egypt (World Bank 1979, 1 2 6 ) . ~ Somewhere along the way, though, "the African Industrial Revolution" slipped off the track. The script of Zambian "emergence" via industrialization and urbanization has been confounded by more than two decades of steep economic decline. According to the World Bank, per capita income in Zambia fell by more than 50 percent from 1974 to 1994 (World Bank 1996, 562). GNP per capita, meanwhile, shrunk by an average of 3.1 percent per year from 1980 to 1993, by which time the figure amounted to only $380, leaving Zambia near the bottom of the World Bank's hierarchy of "developing nations" (only 2 j countries ranked lower) (World Bank 1995, 162). As of 1991, the bank reports, about 68 percent of Zambians were living in households with expenditures below a level sufficient to provide "basic needs," and 5 j percent did not have sufficient income even to meet basic nutritional needs (World Bank 1996, 563).

The Copperbelt in Theory

7

Many causes could be cited for this precipitous decline. Probably the most important is the simplest: a steady decline in the buying power of Zambia's copper on the world market. Copper is the overwhelmingly dominant feature of the export-dependent Zambian economy and has historically accounted for some 90 percent of its exports. And in the years following the oil shock of the mid-197os, the terms of trade for copper exporters declined ~ h a r p l yAs . ~ the table below shows, the market value (per unit) of Zambian exports fluctuated but remained mostly flat. The decline came about chiefly in relation to the goods that those exports could purchase, the cost of which rose markedly against copper, making exports effectively worth much less. To put the matter concretely, where in 1970 a ton of Zambian exports would have bought a certain quantity of imported goods, by the mid-1980s it would have taken more than three tons to buy the same quantity of goods. Since the volume of Zambia's copper exports also declined over the period, the buying power of the nation's exports declined even more rapidly than did the terms of trade. Table I (derived from Jamal and Weeks 1993, 84) and Figure I (a graphic representation of the last line of Table I ) show how badly the buying power of Zambia's exports declined in the years that preceded the start of this study.6 Not only the terms of trade but copper production itself declined through the period. Average annual production in the decade following Independence (1965-74) was some 672,000 tons (Daniel 1979,87), but by 1995 several mines had closed, and the others were mostly showing declining yields. Production had dwindled to 327,000 tons and looked likely to decline even further (World Bank 1996, 562). There is no doubt that this drop in production reflected substantial operating inefficiencies, as has often been charged, as well as a declining copper content in the ore being mined (as is typical of aging mines). But, as Jamal and Weeks have pointed out, it is not surprising to see output decline while external prices are dramatically declining-indeed, this is just what classical economic theory would predict, though such obvious external factors have often been ignored by the proponents of a simplistic "African mismanagement" explanation for recent economic contraction (Jamal and Weeks 1993, I 5, 84; see also Brown and Tiffen 1992). Equally important to Zambia's hard times of late has been the burden of external debt, which continued to grow as the economy contracted, with disastrous results. At the end of 1995 Zambia's total debt amounted to $6.7 billion, and debt servicing took 41 cents of every dollar earned by exports (World Bank 1996, 562, 565). Long-term ex-

TABLE 1. U N I T VALUE O F EXPORTS A N D I M P O R T S , T E R M S O F T R A D E , A N D BUYING P O W E R O F EXPORTS, 1970-1986 Year

1970

1971

1972

1973

1974

1975

1976

1977

1978

1979

1980

1981

1982

1983

1984

1987

1986

Un~tvalueofexports(A) U n ~ value t of Imports (B) Termsoftrade(A1B) Buy~ngpower of exports

100 100 100 100

74 97 76 71

72 103 70 74

119 141 84 81

151 162 91 88

90 197 46 42

100 179 56 59

93 217 43 42

96 241 40 16

135 297 45 47

147 345 43 38

121 331 37 13

104 324 32 32

112 310 36 14

99 307 32 22

101 310 33 18

99 317 31 11

sorrncF.:

Jamal and Weeks 1993, 84

-

The Copperbelt in Theory

0 1 1970

Figure

1 1 1972 I.

1

1974

'

1

1 1976

1

1 1978

'

1 1980

1

1 1982

1

1 1984

1

l 1986

The buying power of Zambian exports, 1970-1986.

ternal debt in 199 j amounted to a staggering $6 jo per capita-this in a country whose 1995 GNP per capita was only $370 (the 1994 per capita GNP of the United States, for purposes of comparison, was $ 2 5,880) (World Bank 1995, 1996). The extreme burden of debt has left the country little choice but to yield to the demands made by lenders (via the International Monetary Fund [IMF] and World Bank) for measures of "structural adjustment" of the economy. Implemented on an on-again, off-again basis throughout the 1980s by a government that alternated between capitulation and defiance and carried through more consistently since the election of the Chiluba government in 1991, these

10

Expectations of Modernity

measures have included devaluation of the currency and deregulation of foreign exchange, the removal of subsidies and price controls for food and other essential goods, the abandonment of government-guaranteed entitlements in the fields of health care and education, and the privatization of the major parastatal corporations, culminating in the selling off of the mines (underway at the time of writing). The aim has been to reduce the government's role in the economy, to establish "free markets" and a secure environment for capital, and to reduce urban consumption that is understood to have distorted rural-urban terms of trade and inhibited agricultural development. It is important to note that these imposed policies of structural adjustment deliberately aimed to reduce urban living standards, in the belief that "high" urban wages and food subsidies had produced an "urban bias" that had "distorted" the economy. Jamal and Weeks have presented a detailed refutation of this argument, showing that the so-called rural-urban gap was largely illusory and had in any case been closed before the harsh austerity measures were applied to "correct" it (Jamal and Weeks 1993; see also Potts 1995). As Potts has put it, "Unfortunately for Africa's urban populations the IMF programmes were only too efficacious in decimating their incomes; even more unfortunately for them, their supposed privileged starting point was largely exaggerated" (Potts 1995, 247). The evidence is overwhelming, she goes on to say, "not only that urban poor have become much poorer in many countries, but that their lives have become an almost incredible struggle." Nowhere is this outcome more evident than on the Copperbelt. Between the declining mining economy and the IMF measures to reduce urban consumption, the lives of the Copperbelt's inhabitants have been "adjusted" to the point where hunger and malnutrition have become commonplace. The World Bank itself reports that the prevalence of urban poverty in Zambia increased from 4 percent in 1975 to just under 50 percent in 1994 (World Bank 1996). Jamal and Weeks, more concretely, cite a study showing that the rise in cost of a simple family food budget from 1980 to 1988 was more than 650 percent; wages did not keep up, so the monthly supplies that cost 64 percent of an unskilled worker's wage in 1980 cost 88 percent of it by 1988 (Jamal and Weeks 1993, 82). It is easy to understand, given these raw economic realities, why Copperbelt residents rioted so fiercely to protest a "structural adjustment" rise in the price of maize meal in 1987; for the urban poor, the price of food had become an issue of bare survival. Indeed, even many fully employed workers, as I found out in the course of my field-

The Copperbelt in Theory

II

work in Kitwe in the late 198os, were simply skipping meals to make it through the month. The majority who lacked formal employment were almost certainly having an even harder time. The following figures on life expectancy and child mortality, taken from the 1990 census, give an idea of the terrible consequences of such catastrophic economic contraction (Table 2).' Economic decline is not the only cause of these demographic trends; surely the AIDS epidemic, which has hit Zambia hard, had a part in them as well, though it is very difficult to say how large that part may be.8 But the dramatic economic downturn has been paralleled quite closely by an equally dramatic downturn in life itself, a downturn so shattering as to shave a full five years off an average life within the span of a single decade. Given such hardships, it is not surprising to find that the historically rapid growth of the Copperbelt towns, long fed by rural-urban migration, has dramatically slowed. In fact, the 1990 census showed that the rate of population growth for the Copperbelt cities from 1980 to 1990 was just 1.7 percent, while the national rate of population growth was 2.7 percent, meaning that the towns of the Copperbelt were actually shrinking as a proportion of the total population (almost certainly through urban-rural migration) (Zambia 1995, 2:23). This is a trend that Potts has also documented for other African cities undergoing "adjustment," which she terms "counter-urbanization" (Potts 1995; cf. Bayart 1993, 12; Berry 1976; Champion 1989). Old linearities here seem strangely reversed. Urbanization has given way to "counter-urbanization." Industrialization has been replaced by "de-industrialization." The apparently inevitable processes of ruralurban migration and proletarianization are now replaced by mass layoffs and "back to the land" exercises. And now, with the privatization of the state-held mining company (Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines [ZCCM]), it seems that even "Zambianization" (the long-established policy of independent Zambia to seek the gradual replacement of white expatriate management with qualified black Zambians) is to become "de-Zambiani~ation."~ Such, at least, was the term applied in a recent newspaper article to describe the new policy of rehiring white expatriate executives to manage the mines before they go on the auction block for sale to private investor^.^^ It is not my purpose to explain the broad economic pattern I have sketched here, which many better-qualified scholars have already set out to do," but rather to trace some of its effects on people's modes of

Expectations of Modernity

12

TABLE 2. LIFE EXPECTANCY AND CHILD MORTALITY OF URBAN COPPERBELT RESIDENTS, 1980-1990 Life expectancy at birth (in years) Infant mortality rate (deaths < age 1 per 1,000 births) Under-five mortality rate (deaths < age 5 per 1,000 births) SOURCE:

55.3

50.3

84.5

107.3

94.5

129.3

Zambia 1995, 2:105.

conduct and ways of understanding their lives. For the circumstances of economic decline have affected not only national income figures and infant mortality rates but also urban cultural forms, modes of social interaction, configurations of identity and solidarity, and even the very meanings people are able to give to their own lives and fortunes. In a total of fourteen months of fieldwork in Zambia in the late 198os, chiefly in the Copperbelt town of Kitwe (and the adjacent Nkana copper mine [formerly Rhokana]), I explored how the economic crisis was affecting the lives of mineworkers and others.12 Everywhere, I found an overwhelming sense of decline and despair. Mineworkers in tattered clothes who were struggling to feed their families had to remind me that there was a time, not so long ago, when they could not only afford to eat meat regularly but could even buy tailored suits mail-ordered from London-a time, indeed, when a better-off mineworker could own a car. And what had been lost with the passing of this era, it seemed, was not simply the material comforts and satisfactions that it provided but the sense of legitimate expectation that had come with them-a certain ethos of hopefulness, self-respect, and optimism that, many seemed sure, was now (like the cars) simply "gone, gone never to return again." I was struck by this sense of an irrecoverable loss of standing, of a demotion in the worldwide ranking of things, as I spoke with a young officer of the mineworkers' union, who was expressing his dismay at how difficult it had become to find neckties of decent quality. Soon, we were talking about the two main retail shopping districts in Kitwe, one located in what had once been in colonial days the "European" town center, the other in the former "location" reserved for "Africans." What struck me was that these two shopping districts were still called (as they had been in colonial days) "First Class" and "Second Class," respectively. Why, I wondered, did people continue this usage? Wasn't this an

The Copperbelt in Theory

73

embarrassing holdover of colonial thinking, and of the idea of secondclass status for Africans? Well, my companion replied, nobody really thought of it that way-it was just what the areas were called. "Anyway," he blurted out with a bitter, convulsive laugh, "now it's all 'second class,' isn't it?" The confidence and optimism evoked by the first of the two quotations at the start of this chapter, the faith in a country and people "going forward," seemed, in the Kitwe of the late 198os, both absent and, in its very absence, somehow present. Like a dream, the idea of Zambians moving proudly into the ranks of the first class was both vividly remembered and manifestly unreal. The signs and symbols of modernitywithin the reach of ordinary workers, for a few brief years-had been abruptly yanked away. Access to the "first-class" things of the worldcars, suits, fine clothes, a decent necktie-was not something to look forward to in an anticipated future but something to remember from a prosperous past-a past now "gone, gone never to return again."13 What was most striking here was the pervasive sense of enduring decline-not just a temporary patch of hard times but a durable and perhaps irreversible trend. As one man expressed it, "From now on, it's just down, down, d o w n . . ." The mythology of modernization weighs heavily here. Since the story of urban Africa has for so long been narrated in terms of linear progressions and optimistic teleologies, it is hard to see the last twenty years on the Copperbelt as anything other than slipping backward: history, as it were, running in reverse. How else to account for life expectancies and incomes shrinking instead of growing, people becoming less educated instead of more, and migrants moving from urban centers to remote villages instead of vice versa? This is modernization through the looking-glass, where modernity is the object of nostalgic reverie, and "backwardness" the anticipated (or dreaded) future. In part, this book is about the modernization myth, and what happens when it is turned upside down, shaken, and shattered. The term myth is useful for my purposes here, precisely because of its ambiguity, because it is often used in two quite different senses that I wish to bring into relation. First, there is the popular usage, which takes a myth to be a false or factually inaccurate version of things that has come to be widely believed. Second, there is the anthropological use of the term, which focuses on the story's social function: a myth in this sense is not just a mistaken account but a cosmological blueprint that lays down fundamental categories and meanings for the organization and inter-

I4

Expectations of Modernity

pretation of experience. I apply the term to the modernization story precisely because I wish to suggest both connotations of the term, and to reflect on the tension between them. On the one hand, the narrative of modernization was always bad social science; it was (and is) a myth in the first sense, resting on fundamental misperceptions about the modern history of urban Africa. But, on the other hand, the myth of modernization (no less than any other myth) gives form to an understanding of the world, providing a set of categories and premises that continue to shape people's experiences and interpretations of their lives. This is another way of saying that the myth of modernization was never only an academic myth. The idea that Zambia was destined to move ahead to join the ranks of modern nations, and that "development" would lead Zambia to ever-greater urbanization, modernity, and prosperity, had come by the 1960s to be accepted both by academics and national and international policy-makers, and by a wide range of ordinary Zambians as well. It has helped to shape the way that many people have experienced events since then. The breakdown of certain teleological narratives of modernity (on which much ink has lately been spilled in academia) has occurred not only in the world of theory, but in the lived understandings of those who received such myths as a kind of promise. If the "postmodern condition" is most fundamentally characterized, as Lyotard once famously suggested (1984), by an incredulity toward metanarratives, then Copperbelt mineworkers have increasingly become postmodern; a cynical skepticism has replaced an earnest faith when it comes to the idea of a modernizing, progressing Zambia. But what Lyotard's celebratory formulation misses is the sense that so many people have of having been cheated and betrayed by this turn of events. For the workers at the Nkana mine, the breakdown of the myth of modernization was no mere academic development but a worldshattering life experience. Indeed, a key argument of this book is that Zambia's recent crisis is not only an economic crisis but a crisis of meaning, in which the way that people are able to understand their experience and to imbue it with significance and dignity has (for many) been dramatically eroded. Yet people are never passive in the face of such changes; mineworkers on the Copperbelt today are struggling to make sense of their experience, and to find new ways of conceptualizing the broad social and economic changes that rock their lives. Anthropologists and others who would construct theoretical understandings of contemporary Africa face a related set of challenges. What does a widespread and prolonged perception of decline mean, when

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scholarship and popular ideology alike have for so long depended on tropes of development and progress, emergence and advance? How are our intellectual and methodological traditions of interpreting African urbanity within a certain teleological metanarrative of modernization to be revised in the face of the non- and counterlinearities of the present? Some have managed to evade those challenges, uncritically recycling a tired modernization theory (Barkan 1994), and laboring (by celebrating "civil society" and the revival of formal democracy while downplaying the wider economic and social crisis) to construct an Africa that is "emerging" all over again (e.g., Hyden and Bratton 1992). Others have left the field altogether or constructed their domains of study in ways that make it possible to ignore or sidestep the intellectually (and often personally) demanding circumstances of the African present altogether (as Guyer [1996] has recently pointed out). Alternatively, some of the best recent works bearing on the contemporary moment in Africa shift the focus away from merely negative characterizations of "failure" or "crisis" and aim to illuminate the social and cultural processes that are in fact taking place in the midst of economic and political crises, exploring, for instance, how currency works in the economic turmoil of West African hyperinflation (Guyer 1995), how political subjectivity is constructed by stateless Burundian refugees living in a Tanzanian camp (Malkki ~ g g ~ aor) how , economic production and distribution actually takes place in "the real economy" of Zaire (now the Congo) (MacGaffey 1991). But there is another possibility that the present conjuncture presents, which is to concentrate on the social experience of "decline" itself. This is what I have tried to do in this book. Older theories are not irrelevant in this pursuit-indeed, reminders of their continuing pertinence surround us. But they bear on the present in an ironic way, as when events in the 1990s recall those of the ~ g g o s or , when the expectations of the 1950s seem to have been not simply unfulfilled but inverted. To highlight the continuing relevance of older theories to events that they fail to account for-the way social-scientific theories and cognate folk understandings of the past haunt the present-I have reversed or played on the titles of classic anthropological works in a number of section titles. On the one hand, these section titles are meant as an homage, to signal my continuing relation to a classical tradition of anthropology (and particularly to the work of the anthropologists associated with the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute) by which I have been greatly influenced, and for which I maintain great respect. But on the other, they mark a

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certain reversal, a shift in which theories originally conceived as external to the social reality they sought to account for have themselves become, for me, ethnographic objects. The classics of Copperbelt ethnography echo, that is, not only in my own theory and method, but in the words and thoughts of the Copperbelt urbanites who were my informants as well. My work is thus neither a simple continuation of the project of classical Copperbelt ethnography nor a straightforward rejection of it but something more complicated. Like Moore and Vaughan, in their splendid critical reinterpretation of the work of Audrey Richards (Moore and Vaughan 1994), I aim to treat the classical literature on the Copperbelt not simply as a historical and ethnographic record but as a historical and ethnographic artifact. The metanarrative of urbanization and modernization is not simply the lens through which ethnographers saw their "data," it is itself an important "datum." Such a double focus-on modernist metanarrative as dubious theoretical model and modernist metanarrative as indubitable ethnographic fact-is as relevant to the contemporary period as it is to the classical era of Copperbelt ethnography. For the attachment of anthropologists and others to a linear metanarrative of emergence and progress is clearly an ongoing matter, and not simply an aspect of a now "out of date" historical past; scholarly thinking in Africa and elsewhere continues to be haunted in subtle and not-so-subtle ways by the imagined teleologies of the modern. It is for this reason that I prefer to speak, when discussing the anthropology of the 1950s and 196os, not simply of "modernization theoryw-suggesting a discredited theory that (in the unselfconsciously modernist language of the academically up-to-date) we have long since "moved beyondH-but of modernism and modernist metanarratives, which (as so much recent theoretical debate around the question of "postmodernism" suggests) we are very far from having "left behind." It is not only that the Marxist critics who so convincingly dissected the failings of modernization theory (e.g., Frank 1967) presented an equally teleological vision of history, offering a rival narrative of African "backwardness" as well as an alternative prescription for the march "forward." Nor is it simply that so many contemporary invocations of such current icons of the up-to-date as "globalization," "democratization," "civil society," and "economic growth" rely on nakedly evolutionist narratives that reduce a complex and differentiated global political economy to a race for economic and political "advance" (cf. Gibson-Graham 1995). For even many of the most influential recent critical analyses of the postmodern reinstate a teleological and Eurocentric evolutionary

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narrative, in which "postmodernity" becomes simply the next rung in a social evolutionary ladder that leaves Africa in its usual place: "behind" (see, e.g., Jameson 1991; Harvey 1990; cf. Tsing 1994 ). The stubborn attachment of scholars and others to Eurocentric modernist metanarratives, then, was hardly laid to rest with the demise of modernization theory in the 1960s. On the contrary, it has been suggested that the fiercely contested battle over the hegemony of these "white mythologies" lies at the very heart of contemporary debates surrounding what has come to be known as "postcolonial theory" (Young 1990). Acknowledging that the term modernism is notoriously vague, analytically slippery, and susceptible to multiple and sometimes contradictory sorts of invocation,I4 I insist on the term in this context for two reasons: first, to underline the point that the dismantling of linear teleologies of emergence and development remains an unfinished taskindeed, a task barely begun-in African studies and elsewhere; and second, to suggest that current debates about modernism and postmodernism need not only to "take account of Africa," but to be fundamentally qualified in the light of the contemporary African experience. The recent history of the Copperbelt, I argue, allows us to see both modernist metanarratives and the recent rise of incredulity toward them (which, as an ethnographer, I both confront and exemplify) in a rather different theoretical and political light than is usually the case. To say this is perhaps simply to say that an anthropological account may make its most effective contribution to contemporary theoretical debates about modernity by turning an ethnographic eye toward conceptions (scholarly and popular alike) of the modern. But what is simply said is not so simply done; to make the modernist endeavor of anthropology itself into an ethnographic object raises formidable difficulties both of method and of theoretical and political positioning. It is these that I take up in the next two sections. OPEN SYSTEMS AND CLOSED MINES: T H E ETHNOGRAPHY O F DECLINE Ethnology is like fishing; all you need is a net to swing, and you can be sure that you'll catch something.

Mavcel Mauss

Mauss's words capture something of the open-endedness and possibilities for surprise that anthropological research usually raises. They iden-

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tify one of the great intellectual pleasures of the fieldwork experience, as well as one of the great methodological strengths of the anthropological tradition. But Mauss's observation also, I have come to appreciate, implies an absence of control that may not be so pleasurable. The researcher is not in charge and cannot choose what strange or terrible creature may turn up in the net. And when it comes time to inspect the haul, it is not always so clear: did you catch it, or did it catch you? I have thought of this darker side to Mauss's playful metaphor many times in contemplating my Copperbelt research, because what my fieldwork net produced was not something intriguing and delightful but something almost unbearably sad. Despair, fear, panic; broken lives and shattered expectations; this was not what I had set out to look for, but it was, like it or not, what I found. The tragic course that so many people's lives were taking was not only an anthropological fact of some theoretical interest; it raised ethical and methodological difficulties of a sort that I was not well prepared to deal with. My fieldwork left me with a terrible sense of sadness, and a recognition of the profound inability of scholarship to address the sorts of demands that people brought to me every day in my research, as they asked me to help them with their pressing and sometimes overwhelming personal problems and material needs. I could proceed with this book only after arriving at the realization that decline, confusion, fear, and suffering were central subjects of the book, and not mere background to it. The way of life I observed on the Copperbelt was not only a depressing one, it was also one that I experienced as difficult to grasp. Urban field-workers, of course, have commonly lamented the lack of the sense of a knowable social whole that fieldwork in rural communities often provides. The Copperbelt, particularly, has long been seen as a difficult and disorderly social environment, a place that gave the impression of, as Epstein put it, "a society inchoate and incoherent, where the haphazard is more conspicuous than the regular, and all is in a state of flux" (Epstein 1961, 29). Certainly, this description resonates with my own field experience. Kitwe, the proclaimed "Hub of the Copperbelt," was a bustling, industrial city of some 300,000. My apartment-dwelling days in the mine-run neighborhood of Nkana West did little to produce the sense of membership in a community that I had acquired in my yearlong stay in a village in my previous research in Lesotho. This was anonymous urban living in the midst of a busy and confusing city; it offered no "whole," knowable social world of which a field-worker might acquire a sense of mastery or confident familiarity.15 Such a setting, too,

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was an unfavorable one for the acquisition of local language skills; like previous Copperbelt field-workers, I found it difficult to make headway in Bemba (the most widely understood of the many Copperbelt languages) in an environment where English was so readily spoken.16 Whereas in Lesotho I had become reasonably fluent in Sesotho and had done all my own interviewing, on the Copperbelt I either interviewed in English or relied on translators and research assistants. In place of the sense of pride and accomplishment that come from knowing a community and a language reasonably well, I came away from my Copperbelt research with feelings of inadequacy and uncertainty. Such anxieties were well grounded, no doubt, in the only-too-real inadequacies of the fieldwork. But it is perhaps significant, too, that such worries mirror quite closely those expressed by my forebears in the field of Copperbelt ethnography." It was not simply the urban nature of the fieldwork setting, though, that accounted for the difficult and disorderly character of my ethnographic object. Equally important was the economic crisis that my informants were experiencing. With their jobs disappearing, their real incomes being cut in half and then cut in half again, their future plans and expectations being shattered, Copperbelt residents in the late 1980s did not inhabit a stable and well known social order. They did not know what was happening to them and did not understand why it was happening. Neither did I. The rules of the game were being abruptly changed while we watched: urban food prices skyrocketed, pensions people had expected to depend upon for their lifetime security became suddenly worthless, previously unheard-of and horrifying crimes became commonplace. Increasingly, people had no way of knowing what would become of them, or how they would manage the frightening economic insecurities to come. When I tried to get from them an insider's view of their social world, what I found resembled less a stable, systemic order of knowledge than a tangle of confusion, chaos, and fear.18 These aspects of the field setting, as I argue at some length in the chapters to follow, confound one of the most basic anthropological expectations of fieldwork-the idea that by immersing oneself in the way of life of "others," one gradually comes to understand and make sense of their social world. What happens to anthropological understanding in a situation where "the natives" as well as the ethnographer lack a good understanding of what is going on around them? What if "the , " the anthropologist, feel out of place, alienated, and local ~ e o ~ l e like unconnected with much of what they see? The sharp line between the

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natives and the ethnographer, the locals and the foreigner, under such circumstances, becomes blurred. This situation, and not just the methodological anxieties that come with urban fieldwork, may be what accounts for the sense of unease I have felt, the sense of not being entitled to speak authoritatively about an ethnographically known place. Doing fieldwork without the comfort of a bounded local community, working in the midst of rapid social transformations-these are not new problems for ethnographers of the region. Indeed, the Copperbelt is one of the places where such challenges were first confronted in anthropology. The innovative methodological and theoretical solutions that the classical Copperbelt literature found to these challenges remain impressive; certainly, they present a set of insights and tools that no subsequent researcher is likely to undervalue. Yet, as I try to show, the established approaches to "urbanization" have all depended, in different ways, on an underlying metanarrative of modernization that is radically called into question by the Copperbelt's recent history. T o take the nonlinear, non-teleological trajectory of the Copperbelt seriously requires a different set of theoretical and methodological tools. Much of this book is devoted to developing these tools. It will not do, in an ethnography of decline, to trace stages and transitions in "the urbanization process," or to demonstrate how some people are "adapting" to the new modern society while others lag behind in the old, traditional one. Instead, my project will be to follow a range of reactions and strategies that shift over time in ways that do not sustain a simple linear narration. I am less interested in a developmental sequence of social and cultural forms than in their temporal coexistence; less interested in a succession of typical forms over time than in an understanding of the whole spread (what Stephen Jay Gould [1996] calls the "full house") of diverse modes of getting by that may exist at any one moment, and how that spread is affected by political-economic shifts over time (see chapter 2 ) . Both my borrowings from a classical anthropological tradition (e.g., my use of "extended cases" of retiring mineworkers [chapters 4 and 51) and my departures (e.g., the development of an idea of "cultural style" to deal with changing forms of localism and cosmopolitanism in urban culture [chapters 3 and 61) reflect this aim: to develop an anti-teleological set of concepts and tools that would be adequate to making sense of the non- and counterlinearities of the contemporary Copperbelt. This purpose is reflected, too, in the style of ethnographic presentation. This is not a community study, and there is no presumption of

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getting to the bottom of things, grounding the interpretation in whole lives known in their totality. I knew my informants in the way most urbanites know one another: some quite well, some only in passing, others in special-purpose relationships that gave me detailed knowledge of some areas of their lives and almost none of others. Like other Copperbelt residents, I was obliged to hazard various ideas about the larger configurations that framed people's lives. Theorized and elaborated, these ideas became an ethnography, a map that might help one to get around in a confusing environment. But the confusing environment in question is less a particular locality than a much broader set of puzzles; the map I offer here is not so much for getting around Kitwe as for getting around the whole terrain of an urban Africa that continues to be haunted by ideas of modernity that are harder and harder to make sense of in relation to the actually existing present. This book, then, has an ethnographic aspect without aspiring to be an ethnography in the conventional sense, just as it has a historical aspect without aiming to provide a social history of Copperbelt mineworkers. Readers seeking complete "coverage" in the sense of either a dense social history of a delimited period or a "thick ethnography" of a delimited space will inevitably come away disappointed. For my analytic object here is neither a spatial community (the town of Kitwe) nor an occupational category (the lives of mineworkers), but a mode of conceptualizing, narrating, and experiencing socioeconomic change and its encounter with a confounding process of economic decline. It is this encounter that I seek to map, and it is in the service of such a mapping that I draw together diverse sorts of evidence bearing on both the complexities and counterlinearities of social and cultural change in the region, and the ways that such processes have been understood by mineworkers and researchers alike. As I pursued my map-making, however, I was accumulating a set of materials that did not have a place on the map. After my analytical argument was complete, there remained a residuum of fragments left over: anecdotes that haunted me, poignant images, and confidences and testimony bestowed upon me, like so many messages in bottles, for delivery to a waiting world. Some of these fragments, like the testimonials and protests that came embedded in a series of letters I received from ex-mineworkers, I felt honor-bound to include in my text, as a kind of responsibility of ethnographic testimony (Malkki 1997). Others, like the "people-watching" vignettes that appear in chapters 3 and 6 , or the newspaper stories that appear throughout the text, seemed to clamor to

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Dear Dr. Ferguson, It is my pleasure to have another chance like this one, putting one across to you. . . . May I apologise for having not replied back in good time, I was bed ridden with malaria and a clavicle fracture which I sustained during the training on my right hand shoulder. . . . I believe you have heard about the food riots or the price riots and the Copperbelt in particular, where a lot of people lost their lives and a lot of shops being brought down to ashes. After that political leadership didn't believe the masses could rise against them and all they could believe was, they were inspired by outside forces. But the truth is not that at all. The masses knows just as them guys know enough is enough. Since independence there is no other country which has suffered other than the citizen of this country. . . . For some time there has been a big [sic]and there is a gloom in the nation because of the lack of medicines in hospitals and children are dying like nobody's business and [there is a] scarcity of essentials since the IMF programmes. Such a situation has come about because of lack of foresight, but the masses see all this thing and one expect them to stay like that in spite of them being crippled. Furthermore you force them to vote for a mess. You know what? We like peace, like anyone else, but if that peace cannot buy you food to feed, medicine and cloth you then it is a mockery to vote. Me personally, there is nothing to soothe my cherished ambitions as I remain confronted with a lot of messified events of my lifetime. We got no beer to drink off this problems, its shortages now and forever. It was really nice to hear from you. Best wishes to you and wife and good luck in the new year.

Your friend,

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communicate more directly with the reader than would be possible if they were more conventionally contained within a general argument. I have therefore attempted, by typographic artifice, to establish a parallel channel of communication with the reader. Inspired by the inset boxes of Bourdieu (1984), the parallel texts of Derrida (1986), and the narrative "panels" of Malkki ( ~ g g ~ as a )well , as by the example of popular magazines and newspapers (whose editors discovered long before academics did that polyphony makes a better read), I have introduced a series of sidebars running alongside the main text at various points, featuring material that in some way illustrates or speaks to the main argument at that point but in another sense exceeds the argument and in some sense bypasses it to speak more directly to the reader. But if all of these are anti-teleological tools for working toward a break with modernist metanarratives of urbanization and modernization, it is not finally possible to achieve such a break-at least not a clean one. For if part of the engagement with the myth of modernization here must be characterized by rejection (myth is a false version), another must be characterized by ethnographic attentiveness and even empathy (myth is a meaning-making device). As I have suggested, social scientific ideas about modernity and urbanization have, over the years, become intimately intertwined with popular ones. The faith in an "emerging," "modern" urban Africa and the gradual deterioration of that faith is thus both what I have been studying ethnographically, and a feature of the literature on Zambian urbanization-indeed, a feature of the specific anthropological tradition that has in some measure shaped my own intellectual horizons. To take this fact seriously is to make anthropological ideas an object of ethnographic as well as theoretical scrutiny. This scrutiny is a particular form of reflexivity, one that puts on the table not so much the biography, psychic history, or field experiences of the individual ethnographer as the intellectual and political traditions and habits of an entire style of anthropology. Making classical anthropology's taken-for-granted ideas about progress, modernity, and history a part of the study has turned out to be an integral part of this project, both because those ideas have been an integral part of the ethnographic reality I seek to comprehend, and because (in part owing to their very inadequacy in the face of that reality) I have experienced them as intellectual obstacles, inherited habits of thought that threaten to creep into my own ethnographic analysis at every turn. T o explore the theoretical and political positioning that made possible the classical literature on Copperbelt urbanization, therefore, is simultaneously to commence an

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ethnographic investigation into what has come to be a widely distributed set of ideas of modernity and modernization; to critically reevaluate a set of long-established and largely taken-for-granted anthropological concepts and assumptions; and to begin the task of identifying and reconstructing my own intellectual tradition and social-political location (cf. Gupta and Ferguson 1997a).

PUTTING "SOCIAL CHANGE" I N ITS PLACE: ANTHROPOLOGY'S COPPERBELT AND T H E LIMITS O F LIBERALISMIS The ancient Greeks and Romans, Johannes Fabian has reminded us (Fabian 1983, 109-IIZ), developed a mnemonic rhetorical device for public speakers that entailed associating a certain idea or theme with each of a series of points or objects (topoi) that lay within sight of the speaker. Having established such associations, the speaker could easily move through a long list of points by the simple means of looking from spot to spot, recalling for each topos the ideas, themes, or arguments associated with it. As Fabian argues, the image resonates powerfully with some modern Western ways of knowing, which have mapped out ethnologically "different" places in a spatial array of distinct "topics" and evolutionary "stages." In this way, Fabian argues, classical anthropology was able to treat social and cultural differences that in fact were located in a single, common temporal present as if they represented a sequence of historical epochs or evolutionary stages, laid out in space instead of time. Appadurai (1988) has extended the insight by questioning the anthropological habit of tightly associating a particular place or people with certain ethnographic themes or institutions that they are thought to typify or exemplify.20He argues that even ethnographic features that are very widely distributed may come to be conceptualized as if they represented a "topic" somehow distinctively associated with a "culture areaH-thus "India" becomes the place characterized by "hierarchy," as if there were somehow something uniquely and distinctively "Indian" about hierarchy (see also Fardon 1990). In the same way that India has been anthropology's designated spot for thinking about hierarchy, southern Africa (and particularly the Copperbelt) has served as the anthropological topos for the ideas of "social change" and "urbanization." It is the place where a classical social anthropology engaged, if not first, then at least most seriously and

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successfully with subjects such as urbanization, industrialization, labor migration, and social transformation. Traditional anthropology, particularly the functionalist brand of it that dominated British social anthropology at midcentury, had for the most part avoided or ignored such subjects. But the Copperbelt was one place, historians of anthropology tell us, where such questions were really grappled with (Kuper 1988; Vincent 1990; Werbner 1984). Because of the place it occupies in the anthropological collection of topoi, the Copperbelt becomes an especially productive site for rethinking anthropological ideas about history and modernity. In particular, taking a hard look at the recent history of this classical locus, a history that contradicts many of the major and minor premises of the classical anthropological approach to "social change," provides an especially inviting opportunity to interrogate the developmentalist teleologies that remain deeply embedded in anthropological thinking about what I have come to think of as the "-izations": urbanization, modernization, proletarianization, commoditization, and so on.ll To appreciate this, it will help to begin with a brief historical introduction to the way that Copperbelt came to be an anthropological topos. Classical social anthropology in Africa, of course, was dominated by what has been called the "tribe study," the detailed, holistic ethnographic account of "a society" (or a community, or an ethnic groupsometimes it was not altogether clear which). Most often this was in a functionalist vein, and usually (as is now widely recognized) in a way that made unwarranted assumptions about isolation, cohesion, and systemic equilibrium. But anthropologists from early on recognized a set of social phenomena that did not quite fit into the framework of the "tribe studyH-phenomena that had to do most of all with colonial conquest and the intrusion of industrial capitalism into agricultural African societies. Early attempts to deal with such phenomena identified the fundamental problem as one of "culture contact" and sought to document the way that African societies were changing under the impact of "civilization" (see Schapera I 9 3 4; Wilson I q 3 6). Another way of conceiving the problem, however, gradually emerged, in part from the engagement of anthropological ideas with the politics surrounding racial segregation and what later came to be called "apartheid" in South Africa (Gluckman 1975; Gordon 1990). In this context, the view that the colonial situation was essentially a matter of "culture contact," in which local African cultures were gradually "influenced"

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by their proximity to "Western civilization," had by the 1940s come to seem increasingly conservative and-for the generally liberal Englishspeaking anthropologists of South Africa-untenable. Indeed, Malinowski had visited South Africa in 1934, analyzed the situation in ''culture contact" terms, and concluded by baldly endorsing racial segregation, warning that Whenever Europeans plan the settlement of large portions of any colony, segregation and the color bar become inevitable. This ought to be remembered by the enthusiastic minority of good-will, who may involuntarily raise high hopes through such doctrines as the Brotherhood of Man, the Gospel of Labor, and the possibilities of assimilation through education, dress, manners, and morals. If, from the outset, it were possible to make quite clear in preaching the gospel of civilization that no full identity can ever be reached; that what are being given to the Africans are new conditions of existence, better adapted to their needs but always in harmony with European requirements, the smaller would be the chances of a strong reaction and the formation of new, potentially dangerous nationalisms. (Malinowski 1945, 160; cf. Malinowski 1936)

As Max Gluckman insisted, in a devastating polemical attack, Malinowski's "culture contact" formulation obscured the fact that colonialism in Africa was not simply a matter of one "culture" influencing another, it was a matter of the forced incorporation of Africans into a wholly new social and economic system. Largely through land alienation and the system of migrant labor, Africans had come to participate with Europeans in a "single social system," and cultural differences took on their significance within this encompassing socioeconomic context. "Social change," not "culture contact," was the fundamental process, and the analytical imperative was to analyze the colonial social system as a whole (Gluckman 1949, cf. 1958; Macmillan 1995). Gluckman here followed in some respects Godfrey Wilson's remarkable 1941 "Essay on the Economics of Detribalization in Northern Rhodesia," which had already insisted that urban industry, labor migration, and impoverished rural villages all had to be seen as part of a single socioeconomic system, whose shape was determined by the demands of a world economy (Wilson 1941). These views gained a greater foothold in anthropology when the British government moved to set up an institute for social research in British Central Africa in 193 7 (the Rhodes-Livingstone Institute, hereafter RLI), with Godfrey Wilson as its first director, and Max Gluckman (following

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the politically motivated removal of Wilson in 1941) as its second If ~this major new research initiative was not, as some (Brown 1 9 7 3 ) . ~ claimed, "the biggest event in social anthropological history since Rivers' Torres Straits expedition" (Gluckman 1945), it was at any rate a major development in the elaboration of an anthropological approach to questions of urbanization, industrialization, and social transformation. In association with a leading British anthropology department at Manchester (where Gluckman later took up an appointment), the RLI anthropologists helped to develop an important and innovative strand of the social anthropological tradition: a movement that came to be called "the Manchester School" (Werbner 1984). In their rural studies, the RLI anthropologists were for the most part content to continue in the "tribe study" mold (Crehan 1997, 5 ~ - 6 2 ) , ~ ~ though many of the works were theoretically innovative, and some did take a special interest in "social change."24 But it was the urban studies that really broke most profoundly with the anthropological status quo. In a series of outstanding essays and monographs, Godfrey Wilson, J. C. Mitchell, and A. L. Epstein set out to adapt anthropological methods to the study of urban phenomena such as labor migration, changing forms of marriage, the meaning of "tribalism," labor organization, legal change, and informal social networks.2s In place of the static, functionalist accounts that dominated the British social anthropology of their day, they focused on change and conflict; against those who insisted on seeing urban Africans as tradition-bound primitives, they insisted on the speed and flexibility with which Africans successfully adapted to a new urban e n v i r ~ n m e n t . ~ ~ The RLI anthropologists considered themselves progressives and often played the role of advocates of African interests (Schumaker 1994, 81). African adaptability, for them, meant that there was no justification for condemning "natives" to "second-class" standing; as Africans adapted to urban life, they should advance proudly to the ranks of the "first class." And if Africans were to be brought to urban areas as laborers, it would have to be accepted that they would become urbanized and would require proper urban amenities such as schooling and housing (Ferguson 1994b; Schumaker 1994; Cooper 1996, 371).~'In sympathizing with African interests, as well as in socializing across the color line, they braved the disapproval of both white settler opinion and, at times, the authorities (Brown 1973; Epstein 199za, 1-21 ). Gluckman, indeed, was at one time barred from entering Northern Rhodesia

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because of his political views (he opposed the settler-sponsored move for Federation and sympathized with African nationalists), just as Epstein had been prevented from entering the mine township while conducting his study of African unionization in Luanshya (Epstein 1992a; Colson 1977; Schumaker 1994). Later attempts to rebut broad-brush denunciations of anthropology as a "handmaiden to imperialism" have often seized on the history of the RLI, citing it as an example of anthropological resistance to colonialism (Brown 1973; Werbner 1984; Kuper 1988, 120) and even, in one account, claiming the RLI anthropologists as anticolonial "radicals" (Kapferer 1996, viii). Since the RLI anthropologists clearly considered themselves to be progressives who had been unfashionably sympathetic with the demands of African nationalism, they were more than a little shocked to find themselves the object of a harsh critique by Bernard Magubane in the late 1960s and early 1970s (1969, 1971). Colonial anthropologists such as Mitchell and Epstein, charged Magubane, had in fact been loyal servants of the colonial system. Their analyses reproduced colonial ideology by taking both the colonial system and the superior position of white colonists for granted, and assuming that the central sociological problem concerned how Africans might seek social status within the colonial system by emulating their white masters. He found fault with the RLI anthropologists' concern with clothing and ethnicity and objected to their generally approving accounts of "Westernized AfricansH-who were, in Magubane's view, symptoms of the pathologies of colonial psychology, rather than "advanced" or "civilized" examples of the heights to which Africans might aspire. The real issue, as Magubane saw it, was the struggle against colonial oppression, a matter that, he claimed, the RLI anthropologists had ignored entirely (Magubane 1969, 1971).'~ So, we might wonder, which is it? Were the RLI anthropologists great radicals, bravely battling racism and colonialism? Or were they arrogant colonial racists, denigrating and condescending to the natives while ignoring the nationalist struggle that was taking shape all around them? In these terms, the question is misposed. A more adequate approach to the matter requires a better understanding of the position the RLI anthropologists occupied within colonial society-something both the attackers and the defenders of the RLI anthropologists, for different reasons, have oversimplified. Politically and socially, the RLI anthropologists inhabited a welldefined position on the liberal fringe of white colonial society, closely connected to the wider community of white liberals in South Africa and

The Copperbelt in Theory

7-9

alienated from the mainstream of Northern Rhodesian settler society by virtue of their intellectualism, their politics, and, in a number of cases, their Jewish ethnicity (Schumaker 1994, 39, 135; Brown 1973, 1979).19 While their own publications mostly contain little information about their own social and political locations, accounts from a few of their contemporaries shed considerable light on the matter.30One observer, for instance, gave a systematic description of the different "classes" to be found within white society, which included the following account of "the most tolerant class," namely, "the intellectual": This [class] is very small. It consists of a few anthropologists at the RhodesLivingstone Institute, where Dr. Bernard Chidzero, a Southern Rhodesian African married to a white girl, was an honoured guest, a few senior administrative officials and a few connected with African education and publications. These few are able to mix easily and on equal terms with Africans, of whom they meet the intellectual cream, and tend to have a dislike, sometimes amounting to hatred, of settlers. They are too intelligent to be able to persuade themselves that they are particularly important and have too great a knowledge of Africans to be able to write them off as "primitive savages." Their reaction against injustice leads them, in fact, to see African leaders through rose-tinted spectacles. (Wood 1961, 67)

The description captures well a sense, which also appears in other accounts, of an aggressive "tolerance" toward Africans combined with a self-conscious opposition to (if not "hatred" of) white "settlers" afflicted by racial intolerance and ignorance. Peter Fraenkel, a liberal white who worked in broadcasting in the 195os, reported having had the following conversation with an unnamed RLI anthropologist after a government official had publicly declared that Africans migrated to town to seek out the "bright lights" of the city. "Hallo," I said, "have you started to measure the candle-power of city-lights yet?" I had obviously started something. "Have you seen it?" he shouted, "Have you seen it? Fellows like that shouldn't be allowed to live. Do you know that years of research have been done into this sort of problem, at the cost of thousands of pounds to the government? And now he comes out with this balderdash. The calorie-intake of an African here at Lusaka is over twice as much as that of a Bemba villager. Over twice as much, though God knows even here they don't always get a square meal towards the end of the month. The main reason for leaving the villages is that there just isn't enough to eat. Starvation, plain and simple starvation. Bright lights, my foot! If only those bloody fools in the Secretariat would read the stuff they wouldn't talk such bullshit." "You can't tell me that he really hasn't read it," I interposed. "I know he hasn't. He never does. When he got one of our recent

30

Expectations of Modernity publications-and a damn' good paper it was too, reviewers all over the world said so-he gave it to one of his juniors and said, 'Condense it. Not more than two sentences, please.' Can you beat it? And such people rule the country.. ." (Fraenkel 1959, 124)

If the anthropologists had little respect for the settlers and government officials, these groups often returned the favor. Not only were eyebrows raised at the anthropologists' intimacy with "natives," there often seemed to be little regard for the research projects-and sometimes an active hostility toward "so-called sociologists who in the name of scientific research are injecting poison into our Race Relations" (from a 1953 newspaper editorial, cited in Epstein 1992a, 18). Epstein, for instance, reports a newspaper article that "welcomed" his arrival to study African courts in the following mocking terms: May we hope for an extension of this valuable service. We may see, for example, in the near future, that Mr. Chin Chang Chung, an 18 year old astrologer, who has been studying revolutionary politics in Moscow for two and a half years, is coming to Northern Rhodesia to unify and develop the process of detribalization and general emancipation of the African Natives with special reference to the improvement of their methods of sabotage and resistance to all kinds of control. (Epstein ~ q g z a z, )

Nor w a s such settler contempt for anthropological research without its lighter side. Consider the following song, anonymously published in the Northern Rhodesia Journal in 1959. It is hard to disagree with Hannerz's judgment (1980, 334-335) that it is worth quoting in full: BATTLE H Y M N O F T H E RESEARCH EXPERTS (To be sung to the tune of the British Grenadiers, accompanied on Melanesian reed-pipes) (Con brio Americano, prejudissimo, Unescissimo) Some talk of race relations, and some of politics, Of labour and migrations, of hist'ry, lice and ticks, Investments, trends of amity And patterns of behaviour Let none treat us with levity For we are out to save 'yer. When seated in our library-chairs We're filled with righteous thought'ho, We shoulder continental cares

The Copperbelt in Theory Tell settlers what they ought to, We'll jargonize and analyse Frustrations and fixations, Neuroses, Angst and stereotypes In structured integration. Strange cultures rise from notes and graphs Through Freud's and Jung's perception Despite your Ego's dirty laughs We'll change you to perfection, We've read Bukharin, Kant and Marx And even Toynbee's stories And our dialect'cal sparks Will make explode the Tories. Rhodesians hear our sage advice O n cross-acculturation, O n inter-racial kinship ties And folk-way elongation, O n new conceptual frame works high We'll bake your cakes of custom, And with a socialising sigh We'll then proceed to bust 'em. Our research tools are sharp and gleam With verified statistics, Our intellectual combat team Has practiced its heuristics From value judgements we are free, We only work scientific For all-round global liberty and Ph.D.s pontific.

Hortense Powdermaker (an American anthropological outsider who came into the RLI circle while doing her fieldwork in the Copperbelt town of Luanshya in 1953-54) actually found herself disturbed by the RLI anthropologists' antagonism toward the settlers, and by their tendency to "take sides" with the Africans, which she felt led to a failure to treat the Europeans, too, as ethnographic objects and informants. She reported one anthropologist who boasted about "getting into a physical fight in a bar with a European because of the man's remarks about Africans" ("But you should have been taking notes!" was Powdermaker's retort) (Powdermaker 1966, 2 5 0 ) . Powdermaker was certainly right that the RLI anthropologists were not much interested in anthropologically understanding the point of view of the settlers; as Hooker (1963,4 5 7 ) has pointed out, "[tlhe most

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extravagant generalizations about the manners, morals, and motivations of white settlers were tossed off by anthropologists who would have raged had such things been said of Africans." The racist white settler was a kind of "other" for these liberal anthropologists, and they saw themselves as battling this less-than-modern other on behalf of "the Africans," whom they claimed both to understand and to defend. Powdermaker's account of the anthropologist brawling with the settler to defend the honor of Africans captures nicely the combination of paternalism and macho antiracism that the RLI position implied: racism is to be heroically battled, but the battle is between two white men, one of whom fights "on behalf of" Africans who are nowhere in sight. The political positioning of the RLI anthropologists, therefore, was not a matter of a choice between white domination and African independence, for those were not the political stances that were meaningful in their social world. Their position was one that existed within white colonial society, not against it; it was a position that found its definition and its moral purpose in its opposition to the white conservative, the "ignorant" racist settler. Neither anticolonial radicals nor colonialist racists (the anachronistic categories into which later readers often try to fit them), the RLI anthropologists were, precisely, colonial liberals. In their relations with the conservative white establishment, they were decidedly "progressive," and sometimes even "subversive." But the institute was, in the end, part of the colonial establishment, not some sort of alternative to it; in its challenge to the dominant settler order, it resembled less a hotbed of radical politics than, as Hooker has sharply (perhaps too sharply) put it, "a determinedly multiracial cocktail party" (Hooker 1963, 459; cf. Schumaker 1994; Brown 1979). While the RLI anthropologists were constantly talking about "the Africans," and sometimes claiming to represent their interests, Africans themselves figured hardly at all in the colonial debates that the anthropologists engaged in. It was for whites-would they be liberals or reactionaries, well-educated men or ignoramuses, sensible anthropologists or pig-headed bureaucrats?-to decide about "native" policy; and the RLI anthropologists apparently saw themselves as vehicles through which "African interests" would be brought to the table. "The Africans" ] suggested of women in the themselves were (as Lata Mani [ ~ q g o has colonial debates over sati [widow-burning] in India) the "ground"

The Copperbelt in Theory

33

of these debates, not the subject^.^' And when African nationalists began to challenge the right of white liberals to represent them (as Magubane did)-to point out, indeed, that the anthropologists weve "settlers"-the anthropologists could only respond with anger, defensiveness, and a sense of betrayal (see Epstein's and Mitchell's responses, published with Magubane 1971; cf. Biko 1978; and see also Brown 1979, 539). A liberal stance having much in common with that of the RLI anthropologists has been the unremarked common ground of a great deal of twentieth-century anthropology, and not only in Africa. Excavating this position, and making it visible as a position, is crucial to the task of rethinking the presuppositions that have underlain anthropological approaches to social change and urbanization. For as I hope will become clear, the "progressiveness" of anthropology has been tightly coupled to its notions of "progress." Anthropological liberalism in southern Africa has depended, for its sense of purpose and direction, on a modernist narrative that said where Africans were going, and why it was necessary that they should go there. Those who obstructed such a process were reactionaries, short-sighted or ill-informed; a progressive anthropology, on the other hand, showed the way "forward." Southern African anthropology has thus been committed, from the start, to the political stance of white liberalism, and to an associated narrative of African emergence and modernization. The distinctive RLI approach to African urban life (discussed in some detail in chapter 3) depended on a metanarrative of transition, in which tribal rural Africans were swiftly becoming modern, urban members of an industrial society. Some viewed such a transition as relatively gradual and evolutionary, with rural elements lingering in town as fading traditionalism; others insisted that urban adaptation was a much swifter and more situational process, and that the African in town was always already "detribalized" (see chapter 3). But all shared a narrative of urban "emergence" and "adaptation," which complemented the parallel story of "tribal breakdown" that was being elaborated by Audrey Richards and others in the RLI's rural studies (Moore and Vaughan 19941.~' Discussions of "the migrant labor system" were a central arena for the elaboration of this conception. Colonial conservatives, associated with white settler interests and the colonial government, generally claimed that Africans in town were fundamentally "tribesmen," mem-

34

Expectations of Modernity

bers of their own "tribal" societies only temporarily visiting in "the white man's towns." This view, of Africans as fundamentally and even essentially rural, "tribal" creatures, was, of course, tied to the anxieties of white settlers and administrators about the potential dangers of a settled, majority population of urban Africans-dangers related to the political claims they might make as well as to the economic competition they might provide. The picture also conveniently justified an absolutely minimal expenditure on urban housing and other facilities, as liberals like the missionary R. G. B. Moore regularly pointed out (Moore and Sandilands 1948, 60). If African workers were really just primitive "target workers," they did not require a "real town," and cheap barracks and rude huts would suffice.33 Against such views, the RLI anthropologists and other liberals fought against any suggestion that "the African" did not belong in town, or that there was a necessary incompatibility between the habits and abilities of Africans born in villages and the requirements of sophisticated modern urban life. Urban Africans were no longer "tribesmen," as wishful administrators imagined; they had to be realistically acknowledged as the "townsmen" they were. Just as representing the African worker as a "target worker" was a way of defending low wages and meager urban facilities, in the same way the assertion of a gradual but inevitable emergence of the "permanently urbanized" worker was for the liberals a way of supporting demands for higher wages, better conditions, and more complete social and political accommodation in town (Ferguson 199ob; Schumaker 1994; Cooper 1996; Parpart 1994). Against the specter of the more coercive and segregationist regimes to the south, Copperbelt liberals held up an image of a settled, permanent urban class of Africans who would rapidly lose their rural and traditional attachments and eventually master the whole of European "civilization," just as they had already mastered European dress and even ballroom dancing (Wilson 1 9 4 2 ) . The ~~ appearance of such permanently urbanized Africans, together with the demise of "the migrant labor system," signaled the emergence of Africans into the modern world, and the rate of permanent settlement, as Mitchell insisted, was nothing less than "an index of the extent to which the traditional subsistence economy is being superseded by a Western economy characterized by differentiated rural-urban production" (Mitchell 19 5 I , 20). Such a political stance invoked, of course, a grand narrative of progress, according to which the native population was moving rapidly along

The Copperbelt in Theory

35

an avenue leading to "civilization," later styled "Westernization" or "modernization." Conservatives like Orde Browne maintained that the colonists were faced with "a very primitive native population" (Orde Browne 1938, 5); liberals responded by declaring such judgments not so much wrong as out of date. Urban Africans were no longer primitives, and those who refused to acknowledge this were themselves living in the past. The two competing images of the African-migrantlaboring tribesman versus permanently urbanized townsman-were in this way placed into a relation not only of opposition but of historical succession. The two ideological stereotypes were made into the polar ends of a historical progression, in which the conservatives' vision represented the past, while the liberals claimed the future (see Ferguson 1990b). If an envisaged replacement of migrant labor by permanent urbanization played a key part in the story of African emergence, so did the very special industry that was mining. The smokestacks and smelters of the mines not only vividly evoked Britain's own "Industrial Revolution," as I have noted, they also economically symbolized everything that was understood to be industrial and modern. The force that was so visibly revolutionizing Africa was a cold, hard, metallic one, driven by the "iron horses" that were the locomotives, and the "finger of steel" that was the line of rail. And the Copperbelt's mining industry symbolized and epitomized a metallic, mechanical, industrial modernity as nothing else could (Moore and Vaughan 1994, 142).

Partly for this reason, mineworkers have occupied an especially prominent place in the classical literature on migration and urbanization in Zambia (and, indeed, in southern Africa generally).35The tendency to take Copperbelt mineworkers as "typical" of urbanites in general has often introduced distortions into scholarly understandings of Zambian urbanism, since most urban dwellers in Zambia are obviously not mineworkers, and since many aspects of miners' existence are quite unusual.36 But the metanarratives of modernization I will be discussing here have largely rested on this single occupational category. And insofar as I will be concerned in this book to contest, disrupt, and historicize these narratives, it will be useful to do so on their own turf, so to speak. I will therefore focus on mineworkers here (as I focused on them during my fieldwork in Kitwe in the late 1980s) not because they are typical but because they are strategic-because the claims of modernist historiography and anthropology have given to them a central role in the em-

36

Expectations of Modernity

plotment of "social change" and "urbanization" that I seek to problemati~e.~' The focus on mineworkers has meant that the ethnographic vision presented here is inevitably a male-centered one in many respects, as nearly all mineworkers are This partiality is an important ethnographic limitation, in many respects. But it is also a motivated, strategic choice on my part. The modernization story I seek to examine ethnographically here is, after all, a gendered story. It operates with a masculine vision of modernity based on a hard, metallic, masculine industrialism (see chapter s). And if this story has a protagonist, it is none other than the (male) mineworker. Focusing on this modernist protagonist in an era of decline is, in this respect at least, not simply a way of perpetuating the androcentrism of the anthropological gaze but of critically scrutinizing it. And one of the things I am concerned to show is how a lack of self-consciousness about the gendered script of modernization has repeatedly led to scholarly failures of understanding-specifically in such areas as approaches to permanent urbanization (chapter 2), to urban-rural "return" migration (chapter 4), and to household formation and dissolution (chapter 5). My line of approach in the chapters to follow begins (in chapter 2) with the question of migrant labor and permanent urbanization, exploring the gaps and failures of a conventional narrative of the rise of permanent urbanization and developing some conceptual alternatives to typologizing models of urban "transition." It leads (in chapter 3 ) to a reconsideration of cultural dualism, in which a set of analytic tools is developed for the analysis of a stylistic contrast between what I call localism and cosmopolitanism in a way that avoids the teleological assumptions of some established approaches. Chapter 4 seeks to ground this analysis by showing how the social forces that maintain localism actually play out in a series of case studies that illuminate the micropolitical-economic power relations that link urban workers with rural "homes." From here, I move on to explore the myth of the modern family on the Copperbelt, showing both how the myth maintains its power, and how-by decentering "the family" and looking instead at the full range of actual trajectories of men and women who move across rural and urban space-we gain a different understanding. The discussion then returns to the question of urban style, as I explore the politics of cosmopolitan style, and its relation to the micropolitical economy of rural-urban relations. I elaborate an argument about the social logic of "noise" and the unintelligible, and develop a critique of conventional

The Copperbelt in Theory

37

anthropological ideas of culture and the associated methodologies of reading and decoding. Finally, the conclusion initiates a reflection on the meaning of decline, and of the breakdown of the myths of modernization-both for Copperbelt residents and for those who write about them.

CHAPTER TWO

Expectations of Permanence Mobile Workers, Modernist Narratives, and the "Full House" of Urban-Rural Residential Strategies

Urbanization has long been conceived as the dominant strand in the process of "social change" in Zambia, and the Copperbelt as a key locus for that process. Many of the most crucial and hotly debated questions posed about the larger society have hinged on the fundamental conception of "urbanizationm-from colonial-era conflicts over "the Native question" and the role of urban Africans, to post-Independence ideas of an emerging Zambia whose modernity was guaranteed by its industrial urban core, to more recent structural adjustment prescriptions for checking "overurbanization" and "urban bias." But there has been an uncertainty at the core of all of these conceptions, an uncertainty rooted in the persistent mobility of urban workers, and the troubling impermanence of their urban residence. Colonial capitalism in south-central Africa, of course, created (often by force) new patterns of movement and residence, especially through labor migration (see, e.g., Onselen 1976). But as historical scholarship has increasingly come to understand, high rates of migration and mobility in the region are not solely the result of colonialism, for they appear to be associated with distinctive forms of political authority and ecological adaptation that are undoubtedly much older (Kopytoff 1987; Vansina 1990). Whatever the causes, however, the high level of spatial mobility of Africans has often confounded modern colonial and postcolonial apparatuses of knowledge, bound as they generally have been

Expectations of Permanence

39

to modern Western assumptions about the use and political control of space. As Moore and Vaughan have shown, colonial rulers in Northern Rhodesia were dismayed at the high mobility exhibited by villagers in Northern Province and could not understand why people did not stay put in "proper villages." They were sure that such behavior was not "traditional," but instead the result of a recent pathology brought on by industrial development and "the migrant labor system." Small, temporary villages, with people moving about in an undisciplined manner between them, they felt sure, were a sign of the "breakdown" of traditional institutions, a breakdown that government policy would have to check if "detribalization" was to be avoided. It was with this in mind that the colonial (and, indeed, postcolonial) government sought, on several different occasions, to establish "proper" permanent settlements, where "development" could take place (Moore and Vaughan 1994; Berry 1993). But if a disturbing mobility characterized the rural areas, the same was true of the urban ones. Workers who came to work in the mines, in the early years, were regarded as dangerously footloose. While some authorities favored a cyclical "migrant labor system," in which workers would balance short spells of wage labor with long stays in their "tribal homes," they recognized that rural-urban mobility was not always so orderly. For urban migrants were not simply docile short-term "target workers" anchored to well defined village homes; their mobility always threatened to become excessive, dangerous, and uncontrolled. Urbanites, it was feared, might become simply "adrift," tied neither to workplace nor to village but moving aimlessly from town to town, evading traditional and modern forms of social control alike, while "loafing" in the townships. Some authorities favored trying to prevent long stays in town and enforcing a "migrant labor" pattern; others urged "stabilization," which meant encouraging workers to settle down in a particular job and become more permanently urbanized.l According to the received wisdom of Copperbelt historiography, the latter interests ultimately prevailed, and an early system of circulating migration (the migrant labor system) was gradually replaced by permanent urbanization, as workers were encouraged to bring their families, better housing and urban facilities were provided, and ultimately (with Independence) colonial controls on urban African residence were lifted. In this view, permanent urbanization eventually became the norm, and the migrant labor system became a thing of the past. In place of the

40

Expectations of Modernity

circular migration of the colonial period, in this view, the postcolonial era brought one-way rural-urban migration, as rural people flocked to town to become permanent urbanites. But the received wisdom proved of little help in the fieldwork I conducted between 198 5 and 19 89, which revealed that Kitwe mineworkers (generally taken to be among the most "advanced" and "fully proletarianized" segments of the urban population), were not permanently urbanized at all. In detailed interviews with fifty mineworkers who were just retiring from or being dismissed from the mines, I found that fortyseven were making active plans to return to a home village, while two were planning to start farming in rural areas surrounding the Copperbelt, and one was planning to join relatives in Lusaka. In the following years, I managed to make contact with twenty-one of these ex-workers, all of whom had relocated in rural areas. In 1989 I briefly visited seventeen of these workers at their rural homes (see chapter 4 ) . In addition to these detailed interviews, I engaged in many informal discussions and interviews with a broad range of workers and others in the mine compound. I was struck by the prominence of rural options in people's thinking, and by the extent to which the desperate conditions of the urban economy were leading even the apparently most "permanently urbanized" people to contemplate what were often humiliating and dangerous rural retreats that would have been unthinkable several years before. Rural connections and rural kin were not a matter of sentimental attachment; increasingly, they were resources upon which bare survival might depend. "Permanent urbanization" seemed the wrong label to attach to this form of life. The recent history of the Copperbelt suggests a need to reassess what urban residence on the Copperbelt has meant, without forcing it into a received, linear urbanization script. Such a reassessment entails both subjecting the modernist tale of convergence with Western-style "permanent urbanization" to scrutiny, and developing alternative concepts for grasping complex and nonlinear patterns. I begin here with a review of the dominant accounts of urban residence and worker mobility and show that they share an underlying metanarrative in which "migrant labor" is gradually replaced by "permanent urbanization." I then critique this conception using the evidence on urban-rural mobility from the 1920s to the present. Finally, I develop an alternative conceptualization of the changing forms of urban-rural circulation on the Copperbelt and draw implications for how we might understand the contem-

Expectations of Permanence

41

porary array of strategies through which workers manage the question of urban residence and rural attachment. The argument I present here directly contradicts a widely accepted general picture of the history of migration and urbanization in Zambia that has appeared in dozens of published sources over the years. For this reason, I feel obliged to dwell at some length on the evidence that has led me to dispute the conventional wisdom, which necessarily gives much of the chapter a rather dense and dry quality. The reader who does not require to be convinced of my revised version of the historiography of urban settlement, and who is eager to get on to the perhaps more interesting matter of how the counterlinearities of urban decline play out in contemporary Copperbelt lives, may wish to skip the evidentiary discussions that make up this chapter's main body and move on to chapter 3 after reading only the first few pages and the conciusion. Specialists, however, who may seek greater substantiation of the argument or a more detailed engagement with the literature, may wish to refer not only to this chapter but also to the longer, more detailed previously published article from which it is largely adapted (Ferguson 199oa, 1990b).l T H E M Y T H O F PERMANENT URBANIZATION Along with a host of valuable studies exploring particular aspects of urban-rural linkages at particular periods in Copperbelt history, there has emerged over the years a kind of conventional wisdom according to which these specific studies are fitted into a larger picture. In this larger picture, changes in the nature of migration and urbanization in Zambia over the years have been described in terms of an overarching, progressive narrative, in which a "classic" migrant labor system featuring shortterm migration by lone, male, rurally based migrants gradually gave way to a "permanently urbanized," "fully proletarianized," settled urban working class. Most often, this narrative is divided up into a number of phases, with a typical form of labor circulation or kind of laborer identified for each phase. There are significantly different versions of this overarching narrative, and these are discussed below. In all of them, however, the forms of urban residence and rural connection maintained by Copperbelt workers are understood as moving progressively from an undeveloped early state of attachment to rural communities-"migrant laborn-toward a more complete, developed state that approximates

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Expectations of Modernity

the condition of modern Western working classes-"permanent urbanization." As Stephen Jay Gould has recently pointed out (1996), teleological evolutionary narratives always operate through the identification of a series of types, with change represented as a "trendH-a sequence or succession of those typical forms. Museum and textbook representations of natural history, he reminds us, have commonly presented a sequence of evolutionary "ages," each typified by a class of organisms taken to characterize or epitomize the age. Many of us might recall from childhood the familiar sequence of illustrations, in which the first shows us early bacteria and tiny invertebrate life forms, the second teems with trilobites, crustaceans, and primitive insects, the third ushers in the age of fishes, quickly followed by the "ages" proper to reptiles and amphibians, mammals, and finally, of course, "Man." What is problematic in such representations, Gould points out, is not their chronology, strictly speaking. Vertebrates like fishes did arrive on the scene long after bacteria and slime molds, just as mammals appeared later than reptiles. But what such representations ignore-indeed, conceal-is the continuing diversity of forms, and the actual relationships between those forms, in each of the periods. For invertebrates do not disappear once fish arrive, no more than fish become any less representative of life on earth once mammals appear. By arbitrarily picking out one set of "types" (from an immense range of variation) as the "main line" of biological change, such a procedure invites the false conclusion that "types" such as arthropods or bacteria are somehow outmoded, belonging to a bygone "age," when the fact is that better than 80 percent of all multicellular animal species today are arthropods, while bacteria continue to be the overwhelmingly dominant life form on the planet by almost any conceivable measure (our "age," Gould insists, is, always has been, and always will be "the Age of Bacteria"). What Gould calls for as a corrective is an insistence on viewing change not as a sequence defined by "typical forms" for each period but as a less linear (and less plotlike) set of shifts in the occurrence and distribution of a whole range of differences-the "full house" of variation that is obscured by teleological narrations and sequences of typical forms. In a world made up not of neat Platonic types but messy spreads of variation, changing realities must be conceptualized not as ladders or trees defined by sequences and phases but as dense "bushes" of multitudinous coexisting variations, continually modified in complex and nonlinear ways.

Expectations of Permanence

43

Gould's account is much more than a contribution to evolutionary biology; it is a veritable primer in unlearning the linear, teleological habits of thought that have dominated the social sciences every bit as much as the natural ones (Darwin borrowed the term evolution, let us remember-against his better judgment, Gould argues-from the sociologist Herbert Spencer [Gould 1996, 1371). For my purposes, it is a reminder of the need to be skeptical of the narration of complex changes in urban and rural residence and mobility that have characterized the Copperbelt's recent history as a linear sequence of progressive phases, and a challenge to develop "bushy," nonlinear ways of conceptualizing the ways that different, coexisting strategies of urban-rural mobility have been distributed over time.3 But before considering alternative modes of conceptualization, let us review the dominant metanarrative that has structured most accounts of Copperbelt "urbanization." THE CONVENTIONAL WISDOM: A MYTH AND ITS VARIANTS

The conventional wisdom written into nearly all existing overview narrations of Copperbelt labor history is that the Copperbelt working class has "developed" through a progressive, linear movement defined by the two poles of labor migration and permanent urbanization. The object of study, then, is the process that starts from the initial phase (migrant labor) and culminates in the final phase (permanent urbanization), with perhaps other-unstable and transitional-phases in between. This conception is shown most clearly in Mitchell's definition of "stabilization" as "the process by which people who were formerly migrant laborers become permanent urban resident^."^ The least elaborate possible version of this progression, of course, is a simple two-phase model: in one period workers were migrant laborers, making short work-trips to the towns and often leaving their families behind; in the next they become permanently urbanized. A number of authors have in fact employed this very simple periodization, often taking Zambian Independence in 1964 and the attendant removal of restrictions on urban settlement as the great divide marking off the first period from the second (although, significantly, there is not full agreement on this point). Bates, for instance, claims to find "facts which appear to go together and which are highly characteristic of migratory flows in the colonial period":

44

Expectations of Modernity ( I ) T h a t men tended t o leave their wives a n d families in the village areas; ( 2 ) that the migrants tended t o work short periods a n d then return t o the land, a n d that labor forces therefore exhibited high rates of turnover; a n d

( 3 ) that the urban migrants maintained social and economic ties with the villages a n d retired there after a period of work o n the line of rail. (Bates 1976, 56)

In the post-Independence era, however, all this has changed, according t o Bates. M e n come t o town with their families, and "persons w h o leave wage employment in post-independence Zambia tend t o remain in town" (Bates 1976,182; for other examples from the literature taking a similar position, see Ferguson [199oa]). Other scholars have given more attention t o the middle ground between migrant labor a n d permanent urbanization by setting u p a n intervening phase, often called "temporary urbanization." This was intended t o capture the fact that many o r even most workers a t any given time did not fit either the classic labor migration o r the permanent urbanization model. The "typical figure" that the "temporary urbanization" model was meant t o fit has been described by Mitchell as follows: [Yloung men left to go and work in town (or in mining centres or on plantations) when they were 18 or 19 years old. At this stage they were unmarried. They worked in town for several years, during which time they aimed to accumulate enough cash to enable them to make marriage payments and so marry. This they usually did in the rural home from which they came. They might then have left for another spell of work while their wives established themselves in their new roles. Later on, if the migratory career persisted, they brought their young wives and young families with them to town. There followed a period of more or less continuous residence in town, during which the wife might have made frequent visits back to her rural home and during which children may well have been sent back to the wife's or husband's parents. Sooner or later, however, the advantages to the couple of staying on in town as against taking up residence in the rural areas would have diminished, and at some point, especially after the man had turned 45, he was likely to have left town for good. (Mitchell 1987, 82-83) For Mitchell, this was clearly a transitional phase, located between the old migrant labor a n d the future permanent urbanization; but it was a phase with a dynamic of its o w n that needed t o be i n ~ e s t i g a t e d . ~

Expectations of Permanence

45

In this respect, Mitchell was building on the insights of Godfrey Wilson's earlier study of the mining community of Broken Hill (today, Kabwe) (Wilson 1941, 1 9 4 z ) . ~Wilson saw that the familiar migrant labor model of male workers who spent "recurrent, short, and roughly equal periods of time in town and country, throughout their early working lives, returning finally to the country in middle age" did not describe the forms of connection mineworkers had with rural areas in 1939-40. At the same time, he noted, few workers were "permanently urbanized," either. Wilson therefore distinguished between "migrant laborersM-essentially rural villagers who came to town periodically to work and had spent less than two-thirds of their time in town since leaving the village-and "temporarily urbanized" workers, who had been born and brought up in the country but had "spent most of their time, in long periods, in the towns since the age of fifteen and a half years," paying only occasional short visits to their rural homes. These "temporarily urbanized," he found, were "the great majorityu-some 70 percent. Wilson also distinguished a class of more strictly rural "peasant visitors," and a tiny nascent class of "permanently urbanized" workers (Wilson 1941, 42, 46). Wilson's scheme was more than a typology, however; it was also a periodization, for he made it clear that, though the category "migrant labor" did not accurately describe the present, it did describe the past, just as "permanent urbanization" pointed toward the inevitable future.' The present phase of "disequilibrium" was a messy transitional phase between the two, for which an intermediate descriptive category such as "temporary urbanization" was necessary. No doubt this way of looking at the urban mining communities was a very compelling one in the 1940s and 195os, when (as I noted in chapter I ) the teleology of history seemed clear, and the convergence of African cities toward a Western model must have appeared indisputable. Indeed, while I argue against the progressive periodization originally put forward by Wilson and Mitchell, it is striking how much more complex and nuanced their treatments were than are those even of some more recent writers. What is surprising, in retrospect, is not that the threephase evolutionary model should have been accepted in the 1940s and 195os, but that it should have continued as the dominant view-largely unchallenged and unexamined-not only into the 1960s but right on through the 1370s and 1980s. Heisler's periodization of Zambian urbanization, for instance, is based on a succession of three types of town, correlated with three types of worker. First, in this view, came "Labor Camps," within which Af-

Expectations of Modernity

46

rican workers were accommodated only as short-term, cyclical labor migrants o r "permanent target workers" (Heisler 1974, 29, 85-102). In this period, taxation induced migrants to work for as short a time as possible in industrial centres. From this pattern of behaviour the image of the target worker, who worked for industry for highly specific purposes and only for short periods of time, was formed. Effectively, wage workers behaved like tribesmen when pressed into the service of industry. For instance, they did not bring their womenfolk to the labor camps, which were largely male reserves composed of men who tried to remain in constant touch with their villages of origin. (Heisler 1974,

1s) After the Second World War, however, "Labor Camps" began t o give way t o "Towns for Africans." These were inhabited not by the "Permanent Target Worker," but by the "Temporary Target Worker," w h o stayed in town for long periods of time, accompanied by his wife a n d children, returning t o the "home" village only when old age o r misfortune required it. Length of service o n the job rose rapidly during this period, a n d urban accommodations were provided; but the necessity of rural retirement forced the worker t o keep one foot in the village a n d one foot in town (Heisler 1974, I S , 26-29, 126). Finally, with Independence, came "African Towns," a n d "Industrial Man," a worker "totally committed t o African Towns" and "totally dependent o n the capitalist economy" for livelihood (Heisler 1974, 29, 86). At this stage, urbanization began t o become truly permanent, a n d urban retirement became ~ o s s i b l e(Heisler 1974, 104, I 14-1 I 5, 123). This view has been reiterated often in summaries of Zambian urbanization. Little repeats Heisler's account of the migrant labor phase almost verbatim a n d follows his periodization closely (Little 1973, I 6). Cliffe, for his part, has claimed: In an initial colonial period [i.e., phase one], a whole paraphernalia of measures, reminiscent of those still in operation in South Africa, were used to limit the presence of Africans in the towns and mines to those who were employed and for the periods when they were employed. The mines at first did not provide married quarters, marriages could not be contracted except in reserves; there was a pass system; property in the towns could not be owned by Africans. Workers were, indeed, typically migrants and were registered as taxpayers back home. After the Second World War [phase two], there were moves, especially from the mining companies, to stabilize at least part of the labor force. African townships were built in the Copperbelt, with family housing, school provision and other social facilities. So instead of so

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47

much circulation there was a tendency of many Zambians to stay in jobs and remain in urban residence longer. . . . The provision of housing and even the right to residence was still legally restricted to those in jobs. More unrestricted movement to towns had to await the changed political circumstances of Independence [phase three]. Since then the flood to town has been at a rate which makes Zambia's urban population about the highest in black Africa. . . . The indications are that the urban population is much more settled. Labor turnover is now very low. . . . And officials assume that part of the rapid post-1964 urbanisation was of womenfolk joining their men. (Cliffe 1979,153-154)

More recently, Parpart shaped her detailed study of class formation and worker consciousness around an implicit sequence of phases of "stabilization" much like those described above.8 In an initial phase, we are told, "the copper companies were reluctant to encourage the employment of married labor; they resented the cost of housing and feeding women and children" (Parpart 1986a, 142). By the late 194os, however, with the length of service and the proportion of married workers rising, "at least 50 percent of the black miners on the Copperbelt could no longer be classified as migrant laborers, in that they had long established communal and occupational ties in the industrial area" (Parpart 1983, 118). Only a decade later the third phase had been reached, according to Parpart: "By the late 195os, most miners were fully proletarianized and depended on wages and pensions for their long-term security. Many had lost or severely loosened the ties with their rural homelands" (Parpart 1983, 152). Several recent studies of rural life, discussed below, have described the complex realities of rural-urban links in the post-Independence era without reducing them to a simple "phase" or "typical figure." Yet the notion that a neater, more orderly succession of typical patterns may be appropriate to the past is often implicitly suggested. Thus Pottier (1988, 11) speaks of the "demise of the classical rural-urban pattern of migrancy"-suggesting that there was, in fact, a single, well-defined, "classical" pattern that defined migration in the past, although his careful study of migration histories suggests the contrary. Likewise, Crehan introduces her important observations on the continuing connections of rural with urban life by distinguishing the messy realities of the 1970s from "the classic migrant labor system" of the past. Thus, "even though the classic migrant labor system may not operate any more in Zambia, many villagers are compelled to leave the village to seek work in the towns" (Crehan 1981,91). These authors both work hard to challenge

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Expectations of Modernity

the usual orthodoxies about migrant labor in Zambia, and the way that assumptions about classic phases creep into statements like the ones quoted only shows how pervasive is the dominant, progressive narrative outlined above. This brief sampling of the conventional wisdom suggests the dominance of the modernist master narrative of progressive phases leading from a "classic," migrant labor phase to a (present or future) permanent urbanization phase-whatever disagreements the various authors may have about the number, nature, and timing of the intervening phases. The same fundamental perspective can be seen in a great many other works dealing with urbanization and migrant labor on the Copperbelt, especially in more general s ~ m m a r i e s . ~ Before moving on, we should note how often these accounts describe the different phases in terms of "typical patterns" or "typical careers" of a stereotypical and inevitably male "typical migrant." Heisler has taken this tendency to a ridiculous extreme, constructing not only a "typical worker" and a "typical career," but even a "typical personality" for each different phase (1974, 126). But Heisler's is just an extension of a very gener&lprocedure, as can be seen even in the brief review above. The result is that a complex history becomes a narrative of transitions from one "typical pattern" to the next. Since the "typical pattern" describes a male life cycle, it is not surprising that women tend to appear in this narrative only as "their womenfolk" (the word "womenfolk"-hardly a common word-appears with astonishing frequency),1° as wives "joining their husbands" or being passively "left in the village" or "brought to town," like children. It remains to present some evidence that, I argue, when scrutinized carefully, fails to support the conventional account. In reviewing this evidence, I aim both to dislodge the progressive, linear narration of Copperbelt urbanization and, at the same time, to develop an alternative way of thinking about changes over time in modes of urban residence.

THE EVIDENCE: A CRITICAL REVIEW

Large-scale copper mining, and Early Days: Before the Depresszon the attendant growth of towns, began on the Zambian Copperbelt in the 1920s. Beginning in 1922, a small mine was developed at Bwana Mkubwa, near Ndola, which by the end of 1924 employed some 1,400 men (Perrings 1979, 47). But mining did not really take off until 1927, when work began on two large mines, one at Luanshya (Roan Ante-

Expectations of Permanence

49

lope), the other at Nkana. By 1930, construction was under way on additional mines in Mufulira, Nchanga, Chambishi, and Kansanshi. At the height of this construction boom, September 1930, African employment on the copper mines and related concessions was estimated at 31,941, by comparison with 8,592 in January 1927." During this period, labor was obtained in two ways: by contracting villagers (sometimes with the use of coercion) through recruitment agencies (contract labor)12 and by directly hiring workers who came to the mines on their own (voluntary labor). Labor hired on-site was a cheaper and easier solution, where possible, and in the earliest years the mines managed to hire most of their workers on this basis. In 1928, for instance, all labor at Bwana Mkubwa was voluntary, as was 88 percent of the labor at Roan Antelope (Perrings 1979,47,92). The construction boom forced the mines to turn to more contract labor for a short time (e.g., 44 percent at Roan Antelope in 19281, and in 1931 it was said that 10,942 out of some 30,000 mine employees were recruited.13 After the depression, however, labor recruitment was done away with altogether, in favor of an all-voluntary labor force (Parpart 1983, 47). It is often claimed that this early period was characterized by shortterm, cyclical male migration, in which men "did not bring their womenfolk to the labor camps" (Heisler 1974, 15) and mining companies "were reluctant to encourage the employment of married labor" and "resented the cost of housing and feeding women and children" (Parpart 1983, 142). Undoubtedly a great many workers during this period were single or unaccompanied by families, but the conventional view misrepresents both the policies of the mine companies and the behavior of the workers. For there is abundant evidence that the mine companies encouraged the presence of women and families on the mines from the beginning and perceived that it was in their interest to do so. Chauncey has shown convincingly that the policy of the mines from the very start was to gain a competitive advantage over labor markets to the south (South Africa and Southern Rhodesia) by allowing and encouraging the presence of wives and children; that the decision to allow families was made "almost immediately"; and that "women lived in the mining camps from the earliest years" (Chauncey 1981, 137, 142). Even as early as 1926 at Bwana Mkubwa mine, some 25 percent of miners were recognized as accompanied by their immediate dependents (a figure that can be compared to 20 percent "married" at Roan Antelope in 1927 [Chauncey 1981, 1421 and 30 percent "married" on all mines in 193 I [Parpart 1983, 143]), and the mine management was

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Expectations of Modernity

already calling for a permanent black town adjacent to the mine, to be settled by "detribalized Africans." In 193 I an official of the Rhodesian Anglo-American mining company proposed settling several thousand families from Nyasaland on the Copperbelt as a permanent skilled urban workforce (Perrings 1979, 96-97). The Department of Native Affairs noted in 1930 that "[dlefinite encouragement is being given to natives by some of the large employers to become detribalized and to reside for long periods of years if not permanently in the vicinity of their places of employment" (Perrings 1979,97). Compound managers of the time, for their part, have recalled that, in a labor-shortage economy, it would have been "practically impossible" to obtain labor without allowing wives and families (Chauncey 1981, 37; Parpart 1983, 3 5 ) . There was thus nothing in official policy in this period to suggest that the mines enforced, or even desired, a cyclical system of short-term migration by unattached men.14 Neither does the behavior of the workers during this period seem to have conformed very neatly to the cyclical migrant labor model. No doubt many workers during this time, especially those recruited on contract, did indeed seek an early return to family and friends in a village. The construction boom in particular, featuring as it did a short-term burst of unskilled jobs along with large quantities of recruited labor, contributes to such a view of Copperbelt workers as typically shortterm, rural-dwelling men. But the circumstances of the very short boom were anything but typical, and the evidence suggests that, already in the 1920s and early 193os, many Copperbelt mineworkers were much more used to long-term urban dwelling than the image of the cyclical migrant would suggest. Indeed, material to be presented in the following section indicates that many of the early Copperbelt workers had long histories of urban employment at other labor centers in the region, especially in the Katanga mines in the Belgian Congo and in the mining centers of Southern Rhodesia. Already in 1920-21, for instance, it was said that some nine thousand Northern Rhodesians were employed by Union MiniZre in Katanga alone, and in 1929 fifty thousand Northern Rhodesians were still employed outside the country (Parpart 1983, 31-32; cf. Meebelo 1986, 19). When these experienced workers came to the Copperbelt, they were not raw village recruits but seasoned urbanites, exhibiting patterns of mobility and family life that the conventional wisdom would suggest first emerged only in the 1940s and 1950s. The patterns are most clearly visible in the response of the supposedly "mi-

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51

grant" labor force to the depression of 1931-32, with its consequent mass unemployment, explored in the following section.

From the Depression to the Second World War In 1931 the slump in the world economy reached the Copperbelt. In the face of losses owing to the depressed price of copper, the mining companies scaled back their operations drastically. In February 1931, Bwana Mkubwa mine was shut down. Later that year, work on Chambishi, Nchanga, and Mufulira mines was also stopped, and a development program at Kansanshi stopped the following year. The impact on the labor market was accentuated by the fact that construction work at the two remaining mines was ending at the same time-in May 1931 at Roan Antelope and in December of the same year at Nkana. African employment on the mines, which had hit a peak of 3 1,941 at the height of the construction boom in September 1930, dropped to 19,j 13 by the following September, and to 6,677 at the end of 1932.'~ Dismissed African workers were simply supposed to "go home" to rural villages during the slump, and many did so. But it is clear that other workers, having worked for some years on the Copperbelt or in other urban centers in Katanga, Southern Rhodesia, or South Africa, "had been away from the villages in wage employment for a long time" and "felt so out of touch that they refused to return," even in the face of the mine closures (Berger 1974, 21). Unemployment in the mining centers was widespread from 1931 onward. According to one source, in the early 1930s there were four thousand black unemployed in Ndola alone (Gann 1964, 254), and a colonial report investigating the Copperbelt strike of 193 5 reported "many thousands" of unemployed at all three operating mines. These unemployed workers, reportedly including among them an underclass comprising "numbers" of Africans "living on their wits as gamblers, thieves and the like," had after the slump been unable or unwilling to return to a village and were instead staying on with friends or relatives in the towns and compounds (Colonial Office 193 5, 39). In 193 6 the District Commissioner at Ndola reckoned that half of the Africans who entered his camp in search of work were unsuccessful and "roamed the camp" (Heisler 1974, 97). Perrings has reviewed the evidence and concluded that a Native Industry Labor Advisory Board estimate of 10 percent unemployment in the mining towns for 193s "is probably a conservative one" (Perrings 1979, 119). The difference between some of these urban workers and the stereo-

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typical figure of the migrant laborer is shown clearly by the case of a certain Henry Chibangwa, who served as a clerk and interpreter at Roan Antelope in the early years on the Copperbelt. Chibangwa formed an association of Bemba workers around 1933, which collected L j to send him to the then-government headquarters at Livingstone to protest against unemployment and wage reductions (Berger 1974, 28-29). In an interview with the Secretary for Native Affairs, Chibangwa reportedly explained, "I am a clerk and an interpreter. I have been without a post for eighteen months. People like me can't go home. We have settled in the towns, adopted European ways and no longer know village life" (Gann 1964, 254). Clearly, not everyone went "home" between jobs. It might be argued that the brief boom and bust period of construction followed by depression in the early years of the Copperbelt could not be expected to provide good evidence for a "classic migrant labor system," or indeed for any kind of steady, "typical" pattern. In the years following the depression, however, the mines soon reopened and reestablished production. From 1935 on through the Second World War, the mines enjoyed a period of steady growth and expansion. Was this, then, when the "migrant labor" phase, the "classic" system of shortterm, cyclical male labor, was to be found? The following sections explore the evidence most commonly cited in support of this proposition. Several authors have supported the claim that the prewar period was characterized by a "classical" circulation of short-term, male migrants by referring to certain government policies that aimed to regulate the pattern of migration. Thus Cliffe (1979, I 53) cites "a whole paraphernalia of measures" used "to limit the presence of Africans in the towns and mines to those who were employed and for the periods when they were employed. The mines at first did not provide married quarters; marriages could not be contracted except in reserves; there was a pass system; and property in the towns could not be owned by Africans." Under these restrictions, Cliffe concludes, workers "were, indeed, typically migrants," and stabilization awaited the postwar period (Cliffe 1979, 153-1 54). Simons presents a similar view, contending that the policies of administrators after the slump reversed early urban stabilization and "precipitated a sharp swing towards the familiar migrant labor system" (Simons 1979, 10). Burdette, likewise, suggests that the circulation of men back to their villages at the end of a contract was "enforced" by "colonial authorities" during the 1930s and that "families were discouraged in the mining camps" (Burdette 1988, zo), while Mijere and Chilivumbo (1992, 282) envision a control so total that "the

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53

migratory process drew exclusively productive males from the rural areas." The position of the government with respect to the question of migrant labor and "stabilization" was in fact very complicated. The mining companies, as has been convincingly demonstrated by Chauncey and others, favored throughout the period a long-term and at least partially "stabilized" workforce made up of men who would stay in town, accompanied by their families, and work continuously for long periods of time-though without the costs and dangers of permanent urban settlement.l"he colonial government was of course attentive to the interests of the giant mining companies but had its own concerns about the political implications of the "detribalization" and long-term urban settlement of large numbers of Africans, particularly after the experience of the depression with its mass layoffs and urban unemployment. The debates within the government over the issue of "stabilization" have been exhaustively documented and discussed." There is much to be said about this official version of historical events, but the formulation of official policy had in the present case only a limited bearing on the actual processes of migration and urbanization.18 As Chauncey has put it in his study of women on the Copperbelt (1981, 143), "it is easier to reconstruct the history of the formulation of company policy on women, and of the response of the state and rural (male) authorities to women's migration, than it is to examine the history of urban women themselves." As clear as it is that the question of controlling African urbanization preoccupied the administration during this period, it is equally clear that what emerged at the level of policy was a series of half-hearted and ultimately ineffective legal regulations and restrictions that the government never had the will or the administrative capability to enforce (Berger 1974, 40). Government policies during this period may reflect the wishful thinking of administrators more than they do the actual patterns of migration and urban settlement.19 Consider the question of "passes" or identity certificates (chitupas), of which much is often made.'O Under the Native Registration Ordinance of 1929, "natives" over the age of sixteen residing or working in the line-of-rail towns were required to carry chitupas, on which would be stamped the details of their employment, the idea being to prevent desertion from contracts and to weed "loafers" and other nonworkers out of town. However, from the start the procedure was "full of loopholes" (Berger 1974, 17). There was no central registry, and duplicate

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chitupas were provided on request to anyone claiming to have lost one, making it simple to get a new, "clean" identity card, or even to change identities altogether. In 193 5 the provincial administration estimated that at least half of the certificates it issued were duplicates (Parpart 1983, 44). Unlike the pass systems of Southern Rhodesia and South Africa, which had formidable effects, chitupas were almost completely ineffective in Northern Rhodesia, where "the Government had neither the men nor the money to enforce its own regulations" (Berger 1974, 18).~l Another example is the case of government controls on the movement of women. A variety of measures was instituted, from the early 1930s onward, to keep unattached women out of the towns, which were to be off limits to all except workers and their wives and children. These included roadblocks on major immigration routes and occasional compound searches led by rural Native Authorities. Once again, however, the orderly, policed movement of people these policies suggest is a fantasy; in practice, as Parpart (1986a, 1994) and Chauncey (1981) have shown, women routinely and massively circumvented these measures, which had only lukewarm support from the government anyway, and virtually none from mining companies that wanted their workers to have the care and feeding of women in town and devoted little attention to fine legal distinctions between "wives," "girlfriends," and "visitors." A policy-bound vision on this point perpetuates the illusion of an orderly "migrant labor system" in which women figured only as wives to be "brought to town" or "left behind" by their husbands and obscures the plain fact that the mine compounds were, by all accounts, full of active, independent women who were "not supposed to be there."22 Another form of official policy that is often cited as evidence for a migrant labor phase is housing policy. During the prewar period, housing was very poor, and officials often justified its deficiencies on the grounds that it was "bachelor housing," intended for the supposedly typical lone male migrant during short stays on the job. Here the government's worries about detribalization fitted nicely with the mining companies' interest in limiting housing expenses. As a result, a large share of the housing in this period, especially at Anglo-American-owned mines such as Nkana, was designated "single men's housing," supposedly intended for the stereotypical migrant laborer. But, once again, the workers did not feel obliged to abide by the official conceptions of them. However overcrowded the conditions, men and women did find ways to live together. Throughout the 193os, as Daniel notes, "whether mar-

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55

ried quarters were provided or not, families appeared to be moving into the mine townships on at least a temporary basis" (Daniel 1979, 65). Physical limitations of space proved remarkably elastic. In the worst years, just prior to the housing construction programs of the I ~ ~ Othe S, crowding of couples and families into tiny spaces reached almost unbelievable proportions. One man in 1941 claimed that he had five married couples living with him; a woman arriving at Mufulira in 1946 remembered staying with her husband in the kitchen of another married worker's house for two years before they were allocated their own house (Chauncey 1981, 138). Heisler reports that in 1944, the average concentration in the urban local authority housing areas was 7.3 persons per room (1974, 92). Thus the fact that a worker lived in a small, oneroom hut, or in nominally "single" quarters, says little about how and with whom he may have been living. A variety of arrangements could coexist with an official designation of "single" housing, just as they apparently did later, in the I ~ ~ O when S , a missionary recalled that supposedly "single" men in fact had women in their rooms: During the day I don't know what they did with ail these town women. They must have clustered together into a few huts where it wasn't illegal for them to be, but in the evening time every house had a woman or two cooking in front of the house. [The compound manager] ignored it because I think he knew these men were not willing to stay there without female help with cleaning and cooking. (Parpart 1986a, I 5 1-1 5 z )

Another type of evidence often cited in support of the early migrant labor phase is the generally short length of service and high turnover rates on the mines in the period before the 195os, and during the 1930s in particular. These figures, for one Copperbelt mine, are shown in Tables 3 and 4.23 Such evidence certainly suggests important changes in employment patterns over the years, but to jump from this evidence immediately to the conclusion that workers were therefore returning to villages after short stints in town (as Bates [1976, 57-58] does, for instance) is moving a little too fast. It confuses the "stabilization" of a worker in a particular job with the "stabilization" of a worker in urban residence and in so doing ignores a very considerable body of evidence suggesting that a pattern of frequent movement between urban jobs may have been at least as typical of the period as movement from town to country and back again. For all the concern with issues of stabilization and the migrant labor system during this period, there was only one systematic, full-scale, em-

TABLE 3 . A V E R A G E L E N G T H O F SERVICE A T R O A N ANTELOPE, 1930-1960

Year

Average Length of Service in Years

s o u ~ c ~Parpart : 1983, 166.

TABLE 4. L A B O R T U R N O V E R A T R O A N ANTELOPE, 1930-1960

Year Ending 3 0 Tune

s o u ~ c ~Parpart : 1983, 166.

% Turnover

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57

pirical study conducted of these issues prior to the war; that was Godfrey Wilson's study of the town of Broken Hill, based on research carried out in 1939-40 (Wilson 1941, 1942). That study concluded in no uncertain terms that the generally assumed, "typical" cyclical migration pattern "is not now typical at all." A small minority of men in Broken Hill are migrant laborers, but the great majority are temporarily urbanized; they have, that is to say, been born and brought up in the country; they have spent most of their time, in long periods, in the towns since the age of fifteen and a half years; they pay occasional short visits to their rural homes and people from home come to visit them. What they will generally do in middle age is unpredictable; they are mostly young men and by the time they reach middle age world conditions will probably have altered. At the moment, of those who reach middle age, most go home; but some do not. (Wilson 1941, 46)

As for the question of high labor turnover and short length of service, Wilson was also very explicit: Both the size of the temporarily urbanized group and the growth of permanent urbanization in town are obscured from a casual observer by the circulation of population between different occupations and compounds in the same town, and between town and town. African laborers do not always stay long in one urban job, but when they leave it they more often take another than go home. The figures on length of service compiled by the large employers of labor for the Government tell one very lzttle about the situation. (Wilson 1941, 56; emphasis added)

Wilson's study was of the lead-mining town at Broken Hill and not on the Copperbelt itself, but he argued convincingly that his analysis was also applicable to the Copperbelt, where he asserted that "well over 50% of the labor . . . is now temporarily urbanized," a fact "no doubt obscured" by interurban circulation (Wilson 1 9 4 1 , 4 8 ) . ~ ~ Wilson's claim that high turnover reflected an urban movement from job to job as much as a cyclical movement from town to village was supported by many other observers during the 1930s. Agnes Fraser, a missionary who spent much time in the mine compounds, remarked in 193 8: "I suspect that unwittingly or wittingly the Mines are badly misled on the subject of the temporariness of their employees by the way they move from one camp or company to the other." Another missionary of long experience on the Copperbelt, Arthur Cross, observed in 1939 that "there is a very large number of Africans who have not seen their homes for 10 or 15 years but have moved about in the industrial area during that time and whose wives and families have paid only brief and infre-

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Expectations of Modernity

quent visits home" (Parpart 1983, 88). A third missionary, R. G. B. Moore, after serving on the Copperbelt from 193 3, claimed in 1943 that "the average man who stays seven years in an industrial area has seven different jobs in that time and at seven different places. Those changes do not mean that he has been home again: he has merely circulated among the towns." Moore also remarked that at a Copperbelt school, inquiry showed that about half of the children between the ages of twelve and seventeen had been brought up in urban places, and many had never been to their parents' home village or had only a vague idea of where it was (Moore and Sandilands 1948, 59-60). A small survey was conducted on these issues by the compound manager at Nkana, generally cited as the mine with the highest turnover rates and the most "migratory" workforce, in about 1937 (Berger 1974, 13). Out of a random sample of forty-two workers, he found that thirty left home before 1920, eight between 1920 and 1925, three between 1925 and 1930 and one in 1930. Fifteen have worked in Northern Rhodesia only, on the mines and elsewhere, eighteen have also worked in Southern Rhodesia, fourteen in the Congo and five in the Union [of South Africa] or in Tanganyika. Nine have never been home since they left, fourteen have gone once and seventeen more than once. Only eight have gone home since 1930. (Colonial Office 1938, 46)

All of this evidence suggests a very different picture from Bates's vision of a typical migrant who "tended to work short periods and then return to the land" (Bates 1976, 56) and implies that patterns of migration and urban residence in the 1930s were much more complex than a facile leap from the length of service data would suggest. In addition to length of service data, conventional accounts often also point to the proportion of married employees in the workforce, which was generally lower in the prewar period than in later years, especially since the 1950s. Often, the rate of married workers was less than 50 percent and sometimes closer to 20 percent, with great variation from mine to mine, as is shown in Table 5.25 Since these statistics suggest a predominance of "single" workers, they are often cited in support of the view that migrant workers "did not bring their womenfolk to the labor camps, which were largely male reserves" (Little 1973, IS), and that "men tended to leave their wives and families in the village areas" (Bates 1976, 56). Like the length of service data, however, the statistics on rates of "married" workers need careful interpretation. First of all, even in these figures, the number of married workers is very large, and the adequacy

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59

TABLE 5. MARRIED EMPLOYEES I N THE M I N E S

( % ) , 1929-1962 Year 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 SOURCE:

Rhokana -

-

Nchanga -

Mufulira

Roan Antelope 28.4 -

48.1 46.5 13.1 53.8 58.1 47.5

-

-

26.0 37.3 43.4 42.9 57.0 65.1 61.9 59.9 58.5 53.3 54.5 44.9

39.51 42.79 46.12 48.36 45.05 45.41 45.98 51.33 52.73 57.50 62.94 69.40 76.90 74.10 73.70 71.00 82.00 77.70

43.88 46.08 46.81 45.84 43.55 47.07 55.70 55.00 57.00 58.00 68.80 65.70 71.40 69.00 75.00 76.00 87.00 82.50

53.99 52.36 53.07 53.61 49.77 52.03 59.64 63.65 67.02 68.80 73.65 75.99 77.90 82.00 79.30 79.60 82.10 86.90

18.9 27.2 28.0 27.0 38.9 41.7 42.6 44.2 39.8 46.1 42.0

-

Parpart 1983, 165.

of a model based on a typical migrant who leaves his family in the village ought at least to be weighed against the fact that, as early as 1935, for instance, most workers at Roan Antelope were not single but married and living with their families. What is more, there is nothing to say that single men are necessarily men who have left wives and families in a village, particularly when boys of fifteen were regularly being hired on the mines (Moore and Vaughan 1994, 146). For this reason, it is very

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Expectations of Modernity

misleading when Bates cites Wilson's 1940 data from Broken Hill as confirming the view that workers in the colonial period "tended to leave their wives and families in the village areas," on the grounds that they show "less than 50 percent of the male immigrants had wives in town" (Bates 1976, 56-57). For what Bates does not mention is the fact that Wilson passionately argued that most men did not leave their families behind. Less misleadingly presented, Wilson's data show that only 13 percent of employed men in fact had a wife in a village, while some 4 6 percent had wives living with them in town.16 But the issue is more complicated than this. In a social setting very much in flux, the existence or otherwise of a "marriage" was a matter far less cut and dried than it might at first glance appear. O n close examination, the official categories of "married" and "single" seem to have more to do with allocations of housing and other amenities than with the nature of workers' relations with women. Colonial officials recognized two kinds of African women in town: prostitutes and wives. Yet more careful observers suggest that, in a social world characterized by fluid and transitory relations between the sexes, boundaries between prostitutes and girlfriends, and between girlfriends and wives, were often blurred. Substantial numbers of women lived in the mine compounds from very early on, and workers in single as well as married accommodations maintained a range of relations with them (see above, pp. 49-50, 54-5 5 ) . Chauncey has shown the prevalence of temporary unions on the Copperbelt and discussed the way in which various sorts of temporary alliances were recognized as marriages by the companies (1981). In a similar vein, Wilson (1942, 64) described a system in Broken Hill in which there was, among the women, a continuous series of categories from the prostitute who hires herself out

for one or two nights, to the concubine, the peripatetic wife of dubious status, the long term wife who occasionally changes her husband and the life-long wife of one man. The same woman, moreover, is often found successively in different categories. Wilson noted a "constant tendency for one type of union to pass gradually into another" and emphasized the arbitrariness, under these circumstances, of the designation "marriage" (Wilson 1942, 66). He pointed out that a "single" man might, after spending a week or more with a "prostitute," acquire married housing, and thus become in company terms "married" (Wilson 1942, 67). O n this point, the companies required only that some relatives of the woman should vouch for the

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61

marriage," but since they never investigated the woman's background, it was easy and apparently common for impostors to pose as relatives (Chauncey 198 I, I 5 I ) . Wilson also stated that many "married" men had, in fact, deserted stay-at-home wives and taken new wives in town, and noted the "common" practice of taking temporary-or, in local parlance, "piece-workH-wives while a wife was away (Wilson 1942, 72-73 ).'? Even the colonial government itself was skeptical of the official distinction between "married" and "single" miners. A 1938 report noted that company figures on men accompanied by their wives "taken by themselves are somewhat misleading," since they "by no means" represented "genuine marriages." On the contrary, the report continued, "Estimates given to us for the mine compounds on the Copperbelt suggest that the proportion of temporary marriages is [high], possibly 50 percent at Luanshya and 60 percent at Mufulira" (Colonial Office 1938, 44-45). Under these conditions, whether the woman with whom a mineworker was keeping company was or was not termed a "wife" might well depend on the context. "Single" men very often lived with women in a way that would in a later period be termed "married," while many ostensibly "married" workers in fact maintained only shifting, temporary alliances with girlfriends and lovers. In these circumstances, the percentage of "married" workers tells us much about official bookkeeping, and perhaps something about the nature of workers' accommodations, but very little about the kinds of social relations in which workers were engaged, or about the nature of their connections to the rural areas. Another kind of evidence often cited as support for the view that mineworkers in the prewar period were short-term, cyclical rural migrants is the demographic imbalance of the Copperbelt urban population, particularly with respect to the balance between the sexes. The precise nature of this imbalance, however, is difficult to state, since no good demographic information exists for the Copperbelt prior to the surveys of the early 1950s (Mitchell 1987, 81; Fetter 1990). For the prewar period, there is little to go on apart from official estimates and, by extension, Wilson's survey of Broken Hill. Heisler cites official estimates of the "urban population" for 1944 of 23 women for every 50 men (Heisler 1974, 87), and Wilson's survey of 1939-40 claimed 7,500 men in Broken Hill compared to 3,500 women (Wilson 1941,zo; it too breaks down to 23 women for every 50 men, perhaps indicating the source of the official estimate). But official demographic estimates were

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Expectations of Modernity

notoriously unreliable. The first real national census in 1963, for instance, showed official estimates for the total African population to be a full 35 percent too low (Berger 1974, I ) , and Mitchell has noted that estimates of urban population prior to the regular censuses were "usually unreliable" (Mitchell 1987, 43). Even Wilson's numbers for Broken Hill depended on official residence figures for the mine and railway compounds, and on "estimates" for smaller compounds. Since we have seen that many people, especially women, managed to live unofficially in compounds, the bias introduced by official tallies is obvious. Parenthetically, even good census data based on direct survey work, such as becomes available for the postwar period beginning in the I ~ S O S , might well have tended to exaggerate the imbalance between women and men. Such a bias seems possible, and even likely, since a great many women in town were technically illegal under the regulations discussed above, and women in town illegally were certainly canny enough to have avoided being recorded as a statistic.28Indeed, a 1950 survey admitted that it had probably failed to count most of the "unemployed" and "temporary visitors" in the towns, since these categories were "believed to have been omitted as a fear of prosecution creates an incentive for their presence to be hidden" (Rhodesia 19 52 , I I ) . At the least, we might consider that the absence of illegal women recorded in survey data and estimates is to be taken with a grain of salt (cf. Fetter 1990, 16). What evidence there is, however, including the testimony of good observers, leaves no doubt that there was indeed a sizable imbalance of men over women during the early period on the Copperbelt. And there is no reason to doubt, either, that a good number of these men were indeed rurally based labor migrants. But the exact extent of the imbalance, and the way it compares to later, better documented proportions, is impossible to gauge even approximately with available evidence. What is more, the outnumbering of women by men is in itself no index of the prevalence of stereotypical short-term "migrant workers." An alternative pattern, according to which workers came as single men, worked some years in town, returned to their villages to find wives, and then came back to live with their wives for the long term in town, for instance, is well documented, and has been described as typical for the 1950s (Mitchell 1987, 82-83). This pattern is at any rate as consistent with what is known of demographic imbalances during this period as is the labor migrant model. The important anthropological literature concerning rural communities in the labor-sending regions is another source of evidence corn-

Expectations of Permanence

63

monly used in support of the view of urban workers as short-term, cyclical migrants or "target workers" in this period. Especially influential in this respect have been Richards's accounts of the Bemba ([1939] 1961; based on fieldwork in 1933-34) and-for a later period but with similar implications-Watson's study of the Mambwe (1958; based on fieldwork in 1 9 5 2 - ~ 3 ) .These ~ ~ studies, clearly informed and influenced by the better-known labor migration patterns of the South African system, described a cyclical process through which young men from the northeastern part of the country traveled to the Copperbelt to work, only to return to rural society after a year or two, having acquired money to pay taxes, as well as new goods and prestige. Attention was especially directed to the effects of this cyclical "migrant labor system" on the social and economic institutions of indigenous rural society. Richards's description for the Bemba of a system in which 40-60 percent of adult men were "obliged to leave the territory annually to look for work" ([1939] 1961, 23) has been especially widely quoted as evidence of the classically migrant character of workers during the 1930s. This particular quotation is an unfortunate one, since Richards apparently meant that 40-60 percent of men were, in any given year, absent and not that 40-60 percent of men made trips in a given year or that labor circulation was characteristically annual, though this is how the passage has often been read. Elsewhere in the book, Richards explicitly states that annual or seasonal circulation was impossible for most workers because of the difficulty and expense of transportation, and that return to the village usually occurred only "when a man is really sick of the town and feels he must get home-say after two or three years or even longer" (Richards [1939] 1961, 397-398). It is clear that neither the Bemba nor the Mambwe described by Watson characteristically migrated in the very short, seasonal cycles that are sometimes suggested (Watson 1958, 661, nor did men with any consistency leave their wives behind (Richards [1939] 1961, 133; Watson 1958,44). But it is also true that these rural studies did suggest a generally cyclical migration pattern in which stays in town were balanced against spells in a rural village. Undoubtedly, many workers did fit this pattern, both in the prewar period and much later on. But the issue is not whether such short-term cyclical migration existed (as it certainly did), but to what extent it ought to be conceived as the dominant or typical mode during the prewar period. And on this point, reliance on rural anthropological studies for a model of the typical urban worker of the period can be misleading. The extension of village-level studies of labor-export areas to a general

64

Expectations of Modernity

model of Copperbelt workers tends systematically to exaggerate the importance and typicality of a cyclical, periodic kind of migration pattern. It is not so much that these classic anthropological studies were mistaken; rather, the objection is simply that while their village-level perspective provided a very good view of certain migration and labor trajectories, it had to remain blind to others. Villagers who made occasional short forays into the labor market were understandably more central to studies of rural social and economic systems than absent long-term urbanites, simply because they were the present and most active players in the rural arena. But by focusing so exclusively on the active and present "members" of village communities, Richards, for instance, was unable to say much at all about the vast numbers of people who left Bemba villages in the 1930s not for one year or two years but for twenty years, or for good. Likewise, Watson tells us that men he interviewed in villages were short-term (oneand two-year) cyclical labor migrants; but the many workers from the same area in the same period who were not keeping to this pattern were, of course, not there in the villages to be interviewed. In this way, people who substantially dropped out of the rural social system, rather than making brief forays into the labor market from a fundamentally rural base, tended also to drop out of the rural studies, largely as a methodological consequence of the village-level unit of study. Examples of such important phenomena as men abandoning families and disappearing into the urban areas, or young women going to town of their own volition, with or without their husbands, are noted, but only in passing.30 Village-based accounts of migrant laborers thus tended to give a very well developed picture of a particular kind of urban worker. But the careless extension of this picture to a generalized model only helps to mask the existing diversity of paths of work and migration, turning one very real and important form of rural-urban connection into a stickfigure "typical worker" that obscures the others. Moore and Vaughan, in their historical ethnography of gender, agriculture, and nutrition in Northern Province (historically, one of the main sources of migration to the Copperbelt), have recently reported findings that support the critique offered here. Reviewing both written sources from the colonial archives as well as labor histories they collected, Moore and Vaughan conclude that their evidence suggests that "circulatory migration was not characteristic of the prewar period as so many have argued." Instead, archival and other sources make it clear that "cyclical migration was only one of a number of coexistent strat-

Expectations of Permanence

65

egies employed by a variety of individuals under the label of migrant labour" (Moore and Vaughan 1994, 146, 147). All of the evidence reviewed above S u m m a r y of the Prewar Perzod suggests that the diversity and complexity of actual patterns of migration and urban settlement confound the simple models of a "classic," migrant labor phase, based on a typical, short-term, rural migrant worker, that figure in the conventional narratives of stabilization. As the focus shifts from official reckonings to actual social processes and practices, it becomes clear that, from very early on, workers and other men and women in Copperbelt towns pursued a range of strategies that crisscrossed the rural-urban divide in a variety of ways. These strategies included shortterm work visits by single men, to be sure. But other, equally important strategies included long-term and uninterrupted urban residence, often involving moves from job to job or from town to town; long periods of married urban residence punctuated by visits "home," followed by rural retirement; independent migration to town by unattached women, who negotiated shifting marital and sexual alliances in town, often with a range of partners; cyclical migration by married couples; long-term urban residence of a male worker combined with frequent visits to the countryside by a wife (who might, in her absence, be replaced with a "temporary wife"); and a variety of other patterns. These are all, in a sense, "typical" of the period; but the practice of taking one of these possible trajectories as typical of the whole, diverse "bush" of variation is a very unhelpful way of conceptualizing such a complex mix of strategies of migration and residence in Copperbelt society during this period. In particular, the description of the prewar period as a "phase" characterized by the "migrant labor system" and typified by a single "classic" pattern of rural-urban circulation impoverishes our understanding of subsequent changes.

T h e Postwar Period and Independence The postwar period was a time of rapid economic growth and rising urban population on the Copperbelt. Production and employment increased steadily in the copper mines during this period, with output rising from 194,000 tons of copper in 1945 to 633,000 tons in 1964 and African employment rising from some 28,000 to 38,000 over the same period (Parpart 1983, 167). Fears of another economic collapse largely subsided, and the long-term growth of the industrial centers seemed assured. As the economy grew, and with it the urban population, government and mine company offi-

66

Expectations of Modernity

cials alike began to recognize the need for more permanent accommodation of Africans in town. Between 1948 and 1964, the mining companies and public bodies of Northern Rhodesia built some ~ o o , o o o houses for Africans in urban areas, at a cost of some £32,ooo,ooo (Heisler 1974, 116-117). At the same time, recreational and sporting amenities and welfare facilities were greatly expanded in the mine compounds. Long-term African urban settlement, which had long been a fact, was finding at least partial official a ~ c e p t a n c e . ~ ~ But it was Independence in 1964 that marked the final and full political acceptance of African urban residence. Laws restricting freedom of mobility were repealed, and the principle of Zambian citizens' right to choose where they wanted to live was declared. Thanks to heavy inmigration from rural areas, the urban population swelled at a spectacular pace; according to census figures, the number of people living in cities and towns of 50,000 or more rose from 682,000 in 1963 to 1,118,ooo in 1969 and 1,761,000 in 1980 (Zambia 1985, 2:80). According to the conventional wisdom described above, these changes were accompanied by a transition to permanent urbanization, in which workers severed their links with the countryside and became true, permanent urbanites. Already by the late 195os, according to Parpart, "most miners were fully proletarianized and depended on wages and pensions for their long-term security" (1983, I 52). Other authors stress that it was the political changes brought by Independence that finally made the African in town a full member of the urban community, and not merely a temporary sojourner. After Independence, in this view, urban workers typically lived, married, raised their children, and retired in town, and cyclical rural-urban migration was by the 1960s largely a thing of the past.32 As with the migrant labor phase, the evidence for the supposed permanent urbanization phase needs to be carefully examined. In the remainder of this section, I explore the main sorts of evidence usually cited in support of the transition to permanent urbanization. It is clear that official attitudes and policies toward African urbanization had changed fundamentally between the 1930s and the 1 9 6 0 s . ~ ~ But in evaluating transformations in practices the question arises, as in the previous period, of how much weight should be given to transformations at the level of official policy. It is often assumed that changes in urban policy and administration were directly accompanied by radical shifts in the actual "stabilization" and permanence of the workers. Thus Hedlund and Lundahl have claimed that the massive population move-

Expectations of Permanence

67

ment to the cities in the 1960s and after "was the result of the abolition of the urban residence permit for Africans, who were previously forced to have a job prior to taking up urban residence" (Hedlund and Lundahl 1983, 31-32), while Burawoy and Ohadike also seem to suggest that colonial patterns of migration and residence rested fundamentally on the presence of legal restrictions that disappeared with I n d e p e n d e n ~ e . ~ ~ This is a difficult position to maintain against the evidence of how ineffective and unenforceable the restrictions in question were. The colonial government may have desired a well-policed circulation of workers from village to town and back again, but we have seen that all manner of unauthorized urban residence flourished on the Copperbelt from the very beginning. It is hard to believe that it was really the modest chitupa pass system that kept urban populations relatively low in the early colonial period, rather than the simple economic fact that few jobs were available, with little housing and low wages; in the same way, it makes little sense to suggest that it was the abolition of this same pass system that brought so many people to the cities in the 196os, rather than the expansion of the urban economy and the prevalence of relatively high wages. With respect to housing, the issue is rather more complex, since the new government did create a climate in which unauthorized "squatter" settlements could flourish. But it is not as if there were no squatters in the colonial period. The flood to the towns began well before Independence; one study in 1957, for instance, found that some 45 percent of the total African population of Lusaka lived in "unauthorized settlements." O n the Copperbelt, authorities were already demolishing unauthorized housing in the 1940s (Heisler 1974, 117). In all of these areas, the new, independent government removed legal obstacles to permanent urban settlement. But it is easy to make too much of a transformation such as this at the legal level. As the discussion below on the question of retirement suggests, the question of whether or not staying in town is formally approved by the government may not be decisive in determining whether or not people have in fact been able or willing to do so. The focus on government policy suggests an epochal divide (previously permanent urban residence was not allowed, now it is approved), whereas I argue that in fact practices changed much more slowly, and in a way that bore little relation to official expectations, either before or after the formal acceptance of permanent African residence. Just as the fact that mineworkers' length of service was low and labor turnover high (Tables 3 and 4, above) was taken as an index of circu-

68

Expectations of Modernity

latory, short-term migrant labor for the prewar period, the steadily rising length of service and falling turnover on the mines since the War have repeatedly been cited as evidence of permanent urbanization, especially for the post-Independence period. Length of service for Zambian mineworkers, which had already risen to high levels by 1960 (e.g., 7.5 years at Roan Antelope-see Table 3) had by 1975 risen to 9.9 years, while labor turnover (22.3 percent at Roan Antelope in 1960-see Table 4 ) had dropped to just 9.08 percent (Daniel 1979, 123-124). Once again, the pattern is surely important, but the suggestion that an extension of length of service necessarily implies a transformation from a "migrant labor" system to one of "permanent urbanization" is simply not justified. In the prewar period, we have seen, short lengths of service did not mean short stays in town, and many (by some accounts, most) workers moved from job to job while remaining in town for long periods. The length-of-service data indicate that mineworkers in large measure ceased moving from job to job, but they hardly demonstrate a shift in rural-urban patterns of mobility. Rather, they seem to indicate rising commitment and loyalty to a particular job in a particular industry. The key question, then, would seem to be not why did mineworkers become townsmen instead of migrants?, but why did mineworkers start staying on longer in the same job? This important question cannot be answered here, but there would seem to be many possible productive lines of inquiry toward answering it, including changing work conditions, higher absolute and relative rates of pay, increased competition for premium jobs, changes in housing policy, changes in the pay and skill structure, and changes in policies on "advar~cement."~~ The increasing proportion of "married" workers in the copper mines also has often been cited as proof that a "classic" system in which men left their wives and families in villages while making short work visits to town was giving way to an autonomous urban system in which wives "joined their husbands" in town as permanent urbanites.3hThe changing rates are taken to imply a sharp shift from a "single" way of life to a "married" one. For a number of reasons, this is very misleading. Just as, in the earlier periods, workers designated as "single" in fact maintained a variety of more and less permanent relations with women, in the same way after the war a great many men officially termed "married" maintained similar sorts of shifting, temporary relations. The unstable nature of marriages on the Copperbelt in the 195os, for instance, has been described by Mitchell (1961), Powdermaker (1962), and Epstein (1981). Mitchell's 195 1-52 survey of cou-

Expectations of Permanence

69

ples seeking marriage registration certificates in Luanshya found that 62 percent of men and 55 percent of women had been "divorced" and "remarried" (1957); Epstein (1981, 291) has suggested that these figures may have underestimated the number of shorter temporary unions unlikely to be mentioned in an interview. Parpart (1986a, I 54) has also noted the prevalence of "temporary marriages" during this period and related it to women's attempts to exercise power and attain some autonomy in a male-dominated economy (see also Parpart 1994). All of this recalls Chauncey's demonstration (1981) for an earlier period of the arbitrariness of official designations of workers as "married" and "single." From a longer view, it is not surprising that more and more men and women-in a variety of domestic and sexual arrangements-should have sought to secure the label "married" for themselves at just the time (in the 1940s and especially in the 1950s) when "married" workers began to secure institutional and material accommodations such as housing and food allowances. Chauncey (1981, I 52) has suggested that a housing shortage in the 1940s created a powerful incentive for workers to have certified "wives" rather than just lovers as a way of holding on to housing. In this respect, Harries-Jones's comments (1975, 45) based on fieldwork in 1963-65 are very suggestive for understanding the high proportion of "married" workers during the period. The African townships were designed so that a predominant portion of their stock of housing was for married couples. Not only that, but while "married quarters" were habitable, accommodation in "single quarters" was so poor as to be below the standard of a well-kept hut in a rural area. Thus having a wife was a means of ensuring a little comfort in urban surroundings.

As more and more institutional incentives appeared for "married" workers, more and more of the various and characteristically shifting Copperbelt liaisons came to be called "marriage." The suggestion that this shift implies a radical break in lifestyles, let alone a sharp break in patterns of urban residence and rural-urban attachments, however, remains questionable. The period under review saw dramatic demographic changes on the Copperbelt, both in overall numbers and in proportions. The overall population of Copperbelt Province more than doubled between 1963 and 1980, and grew at an annual rate of more than 7 percent between the years of 1963 and 1969 (Zambia 1985, 2:97). Accompanying this process of rapid urban growth, it is often asserted, was a process through

70

Expectations of Modernity

which workers were "breaking their rural ties," and becoming "permanent urban workersv-a "true proletariat." Undoubtedly important changes were taking place during this period, both socially and demographically. But they were probably more complex than the characterization above would suggest. A comparison of Mitchell's Copperbelt surveys of the early 1950s with the national census in 1969 suggests that the demographic imbalance between the sexes was waning but still substantial. Mitchell's data for three urban Copperbelt samples in 1951 show a ratio among those aged 15 or above of 150 men per IOO women. The ratio for those aged 25 or above was 171 men per IOO women (Mitchell 1954, 4).37If we compare this to the 1969 national census figure for the whole of Copperbelt Province (overwhelmingly but not entirely urban), we find that for persons 15 years old or above in 1969 there were 121 men for every IOO women; for those 25 years of age or above, the proportion was 142 men to IOO women (Zambia 1985, 2:102). Another major difference shown in demographic data over this period is the increasing proportion of children in town (Mitchell 1987, 81). The presence of children "born and bred in town" has often been taken as a sure sign of permanent urbanization. But the claim of "permanent" as opposed to "temporary" urbanization depends ultimately not on birth but on the later years. And the 1969 census still shows few older people on the Copperbelt; the percentage of the total population over the age of 45 for Copperbelt Province was just 7.5 (compared with 13 percent nationally), and the percentage of women 45 or over was just 2.5 (compared with 5.9 nationally). O n this score the 1969 Copperbelt ~ demographics bear a striking resemblance to Mitchell's of 1 9 5 2 . ~The combination of the increasing presence of women and children along with the continued absence of old people suggests that before addressing the question of the extent to which the demographic data indeed suggest a transition to permanent urbanization we need to look at the questions of retirement and urban-rural return migration. The 1980 and 1990 national censuses, to be discussed in detail in the next section, make it possible largely to resolve these issues. In addition to demographic data, a number of surveys have aimed explicitly to explore the extent to which workers in the 1950s and 1960s were in fact permanent urban residents and the extent to which they continued to circulate back to rural areas. Mitchell's surveys of the early 1950s showed a great variety of relations maintained by urban workers with rural areas and suggested that even workers relatively "stabilized"

Expectations of Permanence

71

in town usually maintained some links with a village "home" to which they intended one day to retire.39 Mitchell found that only some 15 percent of adult males had no intention of returning to a "home" area, and that, even of men aged 20 to 29 who had been in town from before the age of I S , nearly four out of five expressed a wish to return to the rural areas.40 Mitchell has noted that these results call into question claims such as Parpart's (1983, 152) that workers in the late 1950s were "fully proletarianized" and not dependent on rural areas for retirement. Powdermaker's more informal and apparently less systematic survey in 1953-54 found some 60 percent of mineworkers in Luanshya planning to go "home" upon retirement (Powdermaker 1962, 98-99). In what is the most sustained attempt to use surveys to support the claim of a transition to "permanent urbanization," Bates has presented a contrast between these surveys of the 1950s and his own of 1971. Where the surveys of the 1950s show a fundamentally "migrant labor" pattern according to Bates (1976, 56-58), his own surveys of 1971 show a shift to permanent urban settlement (1976, I 80-1 87). The support of Bates's survey data for his conclusions, however, appears to be equivocal at best. He notes that studies in the 1950s of urban adult men "reveal that no more than 12 percent intended to remain permanently in town" and that Wilson's study of Broken Hill found that men visited home about once every 3.3 years (Bates 1976, 57, 58). Yet his own survey of mineworkers at Nkana in 1971 showed that they had visited "home" on average 3.6 times in 10 years-more often, that is, than Wilson's Broken Hill miners in 1939 (Bates 1976, 178). His survey of retirement plans showed 87.5 percent stating that they planned to retire in a village, with only 10.6 percent mentioning retirement in town, again almost identical to the figures from the colonial period (Bates 1976, 183). But Bates goes on to claim that, although workers in 1971 said that they would retire in villages, in fact most were retiring in town. His evidence for this is a survey of 1971 addresses of "persons who had left the employ of Rokana Corporation [today's Nkana Division] during the period 1966-71" showing that most, 60 percent, were as of 1971 in town. This statistic hardly implies retirement in town, though, since the persons leaving employment were not necessarily "retiring," and some of them may have been rather young men. Many were likely to be remaining in town simply because they were leaving one urban job to move to another, not because they were "retiring in town." But Bates makes no distinction between ex-workers retiring in town and ex-

72

Expectations of Modernity

workers who are not yet at retirement age. His argument appears even weaker when we learn that 8 s of the 13 8 sampled workers (62 percent) did go back to a village immediately upon leaving employment, but that 30 of these persons subsequently returned to town. This pattern looks suspiciously like the "circular migration" of old, of course, particularly since we are not given the ages of these men. Bates, however, does not acknowledge this possibility and treats this urban-rural-urban path simply as another case of "urban retirement" (Bates 1776, 183-184). Additional information I was able to obtain from the Copper Industry Service Bureau (CISB) in Kitwe in 1986 casts further doubt on Bates's interpretation of this period. It is a complete listing, as of July 1780, of the names and current addresses of all the mine employees pensioned under the old Zambian African Miners' Local (ZAMINLO) Pension Scheme (operated from 1756 to 1766) who had opted for an annuity rather than a lump sum payment and who were still alive. This is obviously not a random sample, since most workers opted for the lump sum, and many (if not most) of those who did not would have died before 1780. Still, the list contains the 1780 whereabouts of some 672 mineworkers, most of whom left employment in the early and mid1760s, and it is a useful source of information on retirement during this period. Of those on the list who had left employment at Copperbelt mines (numbering some 566), 83 percent were receiving their annuity checks at post offices in small towns or rural areas outside Copperbelt Province, while just 17 percent received their checks at Copperbelt post offices. This sample suggests, as does Bates's own survey, that rural retirement continued to be extremely important into the 1960s and 1770s and confounds any simple notion of permanent urbanization. I have already noted the fact that my fieldThe Contemporary Period work revealed that the vast majority of mineworkers in the late 1780s were not "permanently urbanized" but intended to leave (and in fact did leave) urban life at the time their employment ended (at age fiftyfive or earlier). My own observations about the ubiquity of rural retirements were supported by the head of the Community Development section of the Nkana mine, who estimated that at least 70 percent of retiring mineworkers were leaving town for rural "home" villages-even some who had never in fact lived in or even visited their supposed "home." The mining company, in fact, was actively seeking to encourage their